One of my all time favorites.

Absolutely the worst movie.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

"35 Shots of Rum" opens on Lionel, a black African immigrant who spends long hours driving a train across France. Haggard and tired he returns to his tiny apartment, which he shares with daughter Josephine. "Don't feel I need looking after," he tells her, but it's a lie. They're lonesome without each another. Director Claire Denis then lingers on scenes of unusually tender father/daughter intimacy, such that for a while we think the duo may be lovers. But their relationship is more complex; they want to be free of each other but are wary of cutting ties.Denis' films have long focused on France's former colonies ("Chocolat", "Beau Travail", "White Material" etc). The political contradictions, psychological pressures and after-effects of this colonial legacy are the targets of "35 Shots of Rum, but aside from one scene, in which Josephine and her classmates debate colonialism, resistance, globalisation and name-drop philosopher Frantz Fanon and economist Joseph Stiglitz, such "big issues" remain in the background. Instead, the film's themes are approached subtly. And so we see first generation immigrants relegated to public sector work, a father and daughter who yearn to move on but feel weighed down by familial, historical and past ties, and characters who are either taxi drivers or train conductors, all things transient, always moving, but going nowhere and unable to move on. A sense of alienation blankets the film, characters trapped in cubicles, cars, carts and carriages, sealed mournfully in the aural cocoons afforded by Ipods, or unable to break free of class and racial straitjackets. Josephine – herself both black-and-white, her mother German - strikes up a relationship with a wealthy French boy called Noe, but their love is an uneasy one. They yearn for one another, but she won't let it happen. Her eyes drift to an African student instead. Gabrielle, another neighbour, likewise mourns the death of her relationship with Lionel. The quartet form the modern family, forever splintered. Meanwhile, no one notices the death of the now unemployed Rene, a co-worker whom Lionel runs over with his train. Rene's representative of a marginalised underclass, discarded and replaced like so much machinery."Rum" homages Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring", a film in which a father urges his daughter to leave his side and pursue marriage. In Denis' hands, the daughter's inability to leave is symbolic of a larger form of both cultural division and shaky assimilation. Beyond this, Denis mimics Ozu's minimalist style, gentle pace and elliptical narrative, but her aesthetic is more sensual, more ethereal, more resemblant of Hou Hsio-hsien (particularly "Cafe Lumiere"). Denis' train-eye shots also echo Jean Renoir's "La bete humaine", but the overt horrors of Renoir's work become a more muted, more accepted form of benign violence in her hands. See the films of Olivier Assayas (particularly "Summer Hours"), another French director with similar concerns.Though the film is set in France, few of "Rum's" characters are white, exemplifying the changes which have rocketed across the European landscape in recent decades. French itself is now spoken mostly by people who aren't French, more than 50 percent of whom are immigrants from Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, and who have settled in France and brought their native cultures with them. What, Denis asks, does French culture signify in a world in which only sixty five million of 200 million French speakers are actually French? Of course culture in general has become increasingly unfixed, unstable, fragmentary and elective. Global capitalism sells distinction and individuality as fast as it destroys the same. In response, groups fight desperately to cling to their roots. In Canada the Quebecers tried outlawing signs and other public expressions in anything but French. Basque separatists have been murdering Spaniards in the name of political, linguistic and cultural independence, just as Franco imprisoned anyone who spoke Basque or Catalan. In Belgium the split between French and Dutch speakers has divided the country for ages. So what Denis captures is a world in which financial, commercial, human, cultural and technology flows are faster and more extensive than ever before, resulting in not only widespread alienation, but a counteractive desire to "hold fast" onto what little you have. In France this began in the early 1990s, as debates raged about European integration and the "benefits of multiculturalism", which in reality simply meant the freer movements of capital, goods and people. During this period, France's socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, and conservative president Jacques Chirac, often spoke of the need for alternatives to unregulated markets of goods, money, and people and both demanded more "rules" to govern globalisation. Their words were smokescreens, however, both rampantly liberalising and privatising large sections of the French economy. It's a common tactic: spout traditionally left-wing discourse on the necessity of "controlling market forces", "combating the excesses of liberalism" and "the dangers of unbridled globalisation driven by jungle capitalism", while doing the opposite. Meanwhile, the dynamics of empire has changed. While globalisation reinstates European and American imperialism by allowing First World capitalists quasi-ownership of Third World countries through purchases of strategic government-owned enterprises, the nature of the French economy has itself changed radically. France has since the early 1980s converted to market liberalisation, both as the necessary by-product of European integration and globalisation and as a result of deliberate efforts by policymakers. People like Sarkozy, Chirac and Jospin have sold off more state-owned assets than the previous five governments put together. Whereas fifteen years ago foreign ownership of French firms was only around 10 percent, today over 40 percent of the shares in France are held abroad, and foreigners own more than half of key French companies. These issues are dealt with overtly in other Claire Denis films. With "Rum" she simply presents the fallout. 8.9/10 – Near masterpiece. See "Summer Hours".

Claire Denis' 35 Shots Of Rum is a sombre and humane look at a quartet of Parisians who experience loneliness, isolation and disconnection. Lionel (Alex Descas) is a train driver who lives with his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop). He has a seemingly casual relationship with taxi driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) who seems invested in the relationship to a much greater degree than Lionel. And Noe (Gregoire Colin) who lives alone with his cat seems to have an interest in Josephine. The trouble is that all these characters are so wrapped up in their own loneliness, they fail to communicate with one another.They are so wrapped up, however, that it takes their car to break down in the rain for them to open up to each other. Whether this is a good thing or not is a different question. Denis shoots the film in a desolate manner that has a complete (and fitting) lack of flair, which is a direct metaphor for the characters emotional emptiness. Claire Denis has named Japanese master Yasijuro Ozu as a main influence for the film, and it is quite obvious. The quiet, restrained dignity of Lionel, and the almost silent exchanges between the characters mirror Ozu's classics Late Spring and Tokyo Story. The film can be slow at time, but stick with it and it is richly rewarding. A complex film that is powerfully acted.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

It is a commendation of this film that I simply didn't know what the broad story was after an hour - and still didn't by the end to which I had felt, nonetheless, compelled to watch. Claire Denis' film is called 35 Shots of Rum in reference to a ritual drink binge. The actual occasion for the 35 shots is never made explicit, and so it is with the causal scaffold of the story. As in Pinter, we are invited to experience the relationship-in-itself between characters, devoid of a context which might qualify it. My feeling was that, unlike Pinter, this was actually to get us to extrapolate our own idea of what their relationships consist in.There are hints which one can use as a prop but essentially we are left with a strange - and fantastically controlled (rather like Michael Haneke's contemporaneous The White Ribbon) coil of narrative that juxtaposes happiness with tumescent tension. The lack of narrative can be frustrating but it is actually a more eloquent representative of the naturally complex and sometimes contradictory humanity that constitutes these characters (who are all conspicuously handsome, by the way!). Fine film-making at the very limit of convention. 6/10

The quiet Lionel (played by the cool Alex Descas) lives with his grown up daughter Joséphine (newcomer Mati Diop) in a comfortable, albeit somewhat sterile, grey, contemporary apartment in a Parisian suburb. Life has unfortunately taken away Lionel's wife, and left the two-person family in a state of tranquil solitude, where the father and daughter lean on each other in the big wide world. This outside world is there, as their entourage, but they keep it at bay. Lionel knows they can not continue living like that indefinitely, and one day he will have to let his daughter go, to live her own life, but silently he hopes that that day will be far off. When their upstairs neighbour Noé, who has always been there, announces that he will leave, Joséphine gets angry. It is at that moment that she too realises that the world around her can not be forever frozen. It is time to look ahead.The small family is running on a borrowed time, but happy to be together while they still can. They are compared to Gabrielle, the family friend, who lives in hope and the afore mentioned neighbour Noé, who lives, disorientated, in painful past of his parents' death. Both of them cling to Lionel and Joséphine for their stability, for the calm love they share. As a viewer, you can not help but feel that Lionel "should" be living with Gabrielle and Joséphine with Noé, as that would be a more natural state than a grown-up girl living with her father. But of course, there are no rules to who who should be living with who. Or are there? When Lionel and Joséphine look to their future, what do they see? This in between state, at the end of the close-knit family life and the starting of your own, is the playing field of the film. 35 Rhums, is a very slow movie with a close attention to detail, reminiscent of Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir. We see what is going on, through the actions of the characters, leaving very little to be said. The consequence of such an approach is that you have to slow down the pace, to allow the audience time to take in those details. There lies the risk, and although I was taken in by characters, the "normal" gestures or running of the train through the urban landscape scenes are a little too customary to warrant such an exposure. Whether or not this will bother you is hard to judge, but you will need to be a bit indulgent.Racially, the movie is quite a curiosity. Lionel is black and his wife was white so their daughter, evidently, is métis. So far all is normal. Joséphine's love interest and upstairs neighbour Noé is white. The family friend Gabrielle looks Caribbean. Still fine. Then we get to see his colleagues at the railways, the SNCF, and they are all black! Is there an SNCF line which hires only staff of African or Caribbean descent? Not very likely. And then there is Joséphine's university: the professor and all the students are black! Not even at the university of Martinique, where most people are black, is it an easy feat to write yourself in for a course where not a single white or other raced student has written himself in. What is the point of this bizarre image? Even if they were part of some community (e.g. Caribbean), then that would make more sense showing it in opposition to another French community (say mainstream or Chinese) rather then an artificial submersion. But they are not part of a subculture (no more than their own individuality) nor are the SNCF colleagues or the students. It is a strange touch which is unrealistic and seemingly without purpose.Overall 35 Rhums is a carefully crafted film well worth its time, despite its weaknesses. Make sure you are not tired when you go it, to be able to take in the rhythm, as you are taken along the tracks in the Parisian behind-the-scenes. Lionel and Joséphine will linger with you long after the lights are back on.