35 rhums

Though it is not common to find anything much of value amidst the rambling and formless yayings and nayings that members of a seemingly endlessly broad film viewing web-public post beneath the “User Reviews” heading at the bottom of IMDB pages for pretty much any movie you can think of, it strikes me as unlikely that anybody is going to find a much better place to start assessing Claire Denis’s Pasrisian-banlieue-set Yasujiro Ozu homage 35 rhums than one Howard Schumann of Vancouver does by opening his evaluation of the film there quoting meditation guru Sharon Salzberg (the act of citation suggesting already that we are not exactly reading your typical autodidactic web commentary doggerel), saying that the world of the film is “transparent and illuminated, as though lit from within.” Indeed there are shots in the film – especially but in no way limited to those within the inviting and autumnal apartment that Alex Descas’s train engineer Lionel shares with his adult daughter Joséphine – almost suggesting that the actors themselves are the source of light within the frame, the hearths at the heart of the home. I can think of few films that exude such a keen, perspicacious sense of warmth. The only other films that come to mind are other films by Denis and the more fully realized later films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Indeed the film that 35 rhums most reminded me of was Hou’s made-in-Japan Café Lumière (’03), not surprising considering it is the film that ultimately inspired Denis to make 35 rhums. In interviews Denis explains that she had always been deeply affected by Ozu’s Late Spring (’49), a film whose story of an extremely close widower father and his doting well-into-marrying-age daughter forced to come to terms with the fact that it is the daughter’s time to move on Denis always found mimetic of the relationship between her own mother and grandfather. She simply did not have the “courage” to embark upon constructing her own homage to Ozu’s masterpiece until seeing Hou’s likewise Ozu-dedicated Café Lumière. Both films begin with, and heavily showcase throughout, the gaze of the camera married to the movement of trains as they arrive and depart, negotiate intersecting latticework trajectories like those of their characters, demonstrating a sense of the manifold web of networks connecting spaces urban and beyond, and both are also heavily indebted to the work of their respective master cinematographers, Mark Lee Pin-Bing in the case of the Hou and Agnès Godard in the case of the Denis. It is no small accomplishment, considering the quality of Hou’s film, that the collaboration between Denis and Godard here is by a good measure the more triumphant. There are few films in existence with so palpable and intimate a sense of familial warmth as 35 rhums, all the more remarkable considering how much energy the film puts towards the service, in no way new to Denis, of deconstructing and recoding concepts of family. The trajectories of a handful of characters intertwine like train tracks bringing them into musical back-and-forth workaday dalliances as their private worlds intersect. These private worlds, never entirely private, are like boxes stacked in never-uniform rows, exemplified so beautifully by a shot of an array of warmly-lit apartment windows at night, not quite in perfect rectilinear alignment with one another, but a little off, like a slightly gnarly homemade quilt (an image that parallels a shot inside the Metro headquarters where various screens in ordered-chaos relation to one another detail the underground grid in all of its connected-disconnected complexity; a single shot that says so much more about this environment and its embodiment of disordered civic order than would any number of viewings of Tony Scott’s recent The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 remake). The way these close lives-at-odd-angles dance around one another is perfectly expressed in the film’s most bravo sequence: an automotive breakdown en route to a concert finds Lionel and Joséphine seeking out shelter with their two closest friends from the apartment complex – Gabrielle, played by Nicole Dogue, an old friend and possibly onetime lover of Lionel, and Noé, played by Grégoire Colin, a young man who has known Joséphine since they were both little and who yearns for her with the hardly-repressed blue-hot desire that Grégoire Colin is always yearning with in Claire Denis movies – in a bar run by the supremely gorgeous Adèle Ado. The characters by turns sit, stand, pace, watch each other, and dance, the trajectories intertwining, the participants both apprehensive and solicitous. Joséphine and Noé wordlessly negotiating unspoken and nebulous desire, disruptive intersticial micro-movements push-pulling them at close quarters, until he finally kisses her while her father watches uncomfortably, only to then himself start dancing with Adèle Ado’s hostess as Denis cuts to Gabrielle now watching this newly and querulously bonded duo, volumes of shared history and never-verbalized feelings writ upon her face. Each crossed trajectory creates ripples, the whole film swaying breathlessly with its characters, all to the accompaniment of The Commodores’ so aptly named “Night Shift.” It is one of the most exquisite scenes in all of Denis. Here as ever she is the contemporary filmmaker most willing to lead with her impressions, construct form as if from smoke, sculpt and elevate atmosphere to level of not just a poetry but a metaphysics, encapsulate physically felt, haptic spaces, and again and again say more about people with gestures than they could ever say about themselves in a thousand memoirs, while always leaving the viewer with just enough raw orientation so that part of the pleasure is putting what you are experiencing together for yourself. She continues to inspire and move me more than any other filmmaker. It is unfortunate that I had to experience the film projected digitally (thus robbing this gorgeous little masterpiece of much of its sharpness, shading, and contrast) with a bunch of sniveling rich WASPS who hated it. I have the fucking Palm Spring Desert Film Society to thank for that. As a final coup de grâce they told us that the filmmaker was in attendance for a Q&A after the screening when what they really meant – appallingly, unthinkably – was that some old dude from the Film Society was going to come out and, after some preliminary introductory piffle, put on a Film Society baseball cap that suddenly made him magically able to answer questions as though he were the filmmaker. It took me a couple of minutes, jaw agape, to process that what was actually happening was actually happening whilst my sponsor-cum-geocosmic-consultant, sitting to my right, who had been moved to tears by the film itself, now appearing completely drained of color, continually let’s-get-the-fuck-out-of-here elbow-nudged me until I finally got up and we loudly exited, making our displeasure at the fucking chutzpah of these swine demonstrably apparent. The nerve of these people. Anyway, we’re better now.