35 rhums (2008) - film review

Lionel has had a hard life.  A black immigrant who lost his wife many years ago, he has struggled to bring up his daughter, Joséphine, alone on the modest pay he earns as a train driver.  They have lived a peaceful but withdrawn life together - Lionel thinks only of his daughter, and she thinks only of him.  But as Lionel approaches the age of retirement, he realises that not only will he soon be without a job, he is also about to lose his daughter.  Once Joséphine has completed her studies, she will want to start her own life with another man, perhaps Noé, the young man who owns the flat above theirs.  How will Lionel cope when he has given up the two things that give his life meaning?

There is a raw, almost primal, beauty and depth of feeling to Claire Denis’s films that renders them virtually unique in Western cinema today.  Such is the hypnotic power of her films, the lyrical simplicity that belies their emotional impact in a way that is redolent of the cinema of the Far East (represented by Yasujiro Ozu, Hou Hsiao-sien, etc.), that you cannot help wondering why this kind of cinema is so hard to come by in the West.   35 rhums is Denis’s finest achievement to date, a beguiling and subtly moving portrait of a father slowly coming to terms with the fact that he is going to have to learn to live without the two things he cherishes most in his life, his job as a train driver and the daughter with whom he has enjoyed an intensely close relationship.  What makes the film so effective is that the drama comes from deep within the protagonists, their feelings slowly exposed by the way in which they regard the world around them and how they relate to one another, not with words, but with silent gestures and looks that convey so much about the emotions struggling to break through the placid surface calm.  This is a film that deals with the most banal of subjects in the most unsensational manner possible, and yet it is captivating, so eloquent in the way the inner lives of the characters are revealed to us, the traumas and tragedies which mere words are powerless to express.

In common with many of Claire Denis’s films, 35 rhums has an autobiographical aspect to it.  One of the enduring memories that Denis had of her childhood was the intense relationship that existed between her grandfather and her mother.  It is their story which provides the essence for this film, the story of a solitary middle-aged man who has arrived at the point in his life when he must allow his daughter to leave him and start her own life.  For the part of the character who is based on her grandfather, Denis cast Alex Descas, one of France’s most gifted black actors who had already featured in several of her films, including S’en fout la mort (1990), J’ai pas sommeil (1994) and Trouble Every Day (2001).  In a performance that it is unbelievably true to life, Descas makes us aware of his character’s traumatic inner quandary almost without any external sign of what he is feeling.  Like Denis, he is an artist who does not daub compassion on the surface but instead compels us to look deeper, to go beyond the merely superficial, to wade into the deep rivers of emotion that lie underneath and to actually feel what his character feels.

The other characters are almost as faultlessly cast.  Making her screen debut in the role of Descas’s daughter is Mati Diop, the niece of the distinguished Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty.  Diop not only has a striking screen presence, she is also the perfect complement to Descas, showing her character’s emotional conflict in a similarly introspective vein.  Nicole Dogue and Grégoire Colin, another frequent Denis collaborator, complete the handsome quartet and bring further depth and meaning with their equally restrained, yet equally expressive performances.  It is with the support of this talented cast and, as ever, the great artistry of her cinematographer Agnès Godard, that Claire Denis delivers her most alluring and humane film to date.  35 rhums offers a sweetly melancholic slice of life that immediately grabs our attention with its sublime cinematic beauty and then holds us spellbound with the exquisite poignancy of the story it has to tell, a story of quiet despair told with genuine warmth and feeling.  This is cinema at its most truthful and most engaging - just why are we not clamouring for more films of this kind?

© James Travers 2011

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