SFIFF52: Next Frame Picks for 5/6

[35 Shots of Rum.]

It’s day 14 of a 15-day festival, and a lot of otherwise dedicated festival-goers have probably hung it up out of sheer exhaustion by now. In fact, I’m pretty beat myself. But in case you have any energy (or time!) left, there’s one screening that you should definitely consider checking out: the final screening of 35 Shots of Rum, the new film from Claire Denis, at 9:15 PM. As it happens, Barry Jenkins turned me on to this director, and so ever since I’ve been checking out her work and have been anticipating this one with particular interest. Having just finished watching it a few minutes ago, I can say that it’s well worth checking out. Unfortunately I don’t have enough time to write an original review before tomorrow’s screening, so allow me to reproduce Judy Bloch’s capsule review on the festival page: 

Claire Denis has created a sensual and contemplative body of films over the years, but nothing in her work prepares us for this deeply emotional yet light-of-touch story set among a small circle of Parisians and their friends. In fact, Denis evokes nothing so much as Eric Rohmer in his “seasons” quartet as she follows the various characters in a roundelay of relationships that touches on almost every kind of love there is: father-daughter, old lovers, old colleagues, absent mother, lost sister, unrequited, one-night, budding, brooding . . . Lionel (Alex Descas), a train engineer, shares an apartment with his daughter Jo (Mati Diop), a university student. In the same building live taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and a young man who comes and goes, Noe (the intense and always mysterious Grégoire Colin, like Descas a Denis regular). Together, they are a kind of family. We figure out their roles and relationships only gradually as Denis leaves crumbs along her narrative path for us to follow—it’s one of the great pleasures of this extraordinarily pleasurable film made up of small moments, of looks and silences, of magical touches of physicality and pensiveness. Agnés Godard’s cinematography richly limns an interior architecture in which objects take on an Ozu-like delicacy and immediacy, and uses train tracks (and cars and motorbikes and vans) to propel the story into the out of doors and eventually, the future, as father and daughter face the inevitable: her independence.

It hasn’t lined up stateside distribution so far as I know, so unless it pops up on a local screen during a film-industry lull (and it might, for as we all know, French films do have a way with the Clay), this might be your last chance to catch it in a theater before the DVD release.

posted: 09 May 5
under: The Next Frame