35 Shots of Rum

claire denis must be the most exoticizing filmmaker europe has ever produced. barely telling conventional stories, her best films-chocolat, beau travail and the new 35 shots of rum-are ruminations on the peculiarities of colonialism: how the white west interacts with the dark cultures it has appropriated. denis' unique vision departs from traditional storytelling; she's interested in phenomena of mood and circumstance-the visual rhythms of sexual and racial irony.

35 shots joins what truffaut called "the french tradition of quality" by queering it. denis opens with an étude of advancing/ receding train tracks recalling jean

renoir's memorable motif in the 1937 la bête humaine, but this time the train conductor is a middle-aged black man, lionel (alex descas), contending with technological and social pressures. drawing from renoir's tale of psychologically stressed social mobility-and, significantly, fritz lang's 1956 remake human desire-denis uses the working-class premise to survey a neglected aspect of contemporary france-represented by widower lionel's intimate french-african community: his daughter josephine (mati diop); a doting neighbor who moonlights as a cab driver, gabrielle (nicole dogue); and her son noe (gregoire colin); and a retired railroad coworker martial (djedje apali).

deliberately shifting to the dark side of town, denis can't quite escape bwana/social-worker inquisitiveness. she's studying lionel's world as much as reveling in it and her collaboration with cinematographer agnes godard makes this excursion seductive and beautiful.

at first, 35 shots evokes 1980s multiculturalism-that sympathetic, urbane transfer between classes, cultures and races epitomized in the high/lo pop of jonathan demme (something wild) and neo-bohemianism of jim jarmusch (mystery train). today, multicultural pop feels less compelling partly because its immediate inspiration and social urgency are gone, replaced by society's increasingly familiar crossbred-what '80s british pop magazines called "beige"-reality. europe's self-consciousness about its colonialist history coming home to roost through rising third-world immigration has become an observable cinematic fact.

yet denis exceeds the humanist realism in andré téchiné, ducastel-martineau and dardennes brothers movies that show the new face of europe's ethnic coexistence. better yet, she gets beyond jarmusch's smug, multiculti complacence. denis' fascination with the other (despite the colonialist guilt that it bears) remains inoffensive because it is humanely enlightened.

a scene in josephine's college economics class contains a discussion about the world bank, third-world debt, frantz fanon and the history of slavery. it offers the first grasp that 35 shots is dealing with french tradition differently-viewing history and contemporary circumstance in systemic terms. "you're not here to hope or despair," the professor instructs josephine, "but to develop critical skills, rhetorical skills, analytical skills. that's what we're trying to achieve. try again."

this scene makes denis' political sympathies blatant but it importantly improves on the insufferable classroom scenes in laurent cantent's horribly paternalistic the class-the recent art-film model of liberal consciousness that actually did little more than condescend to both third-world kids' and old europe's resentments.

through denis' richer vision, 35 shots depicts a larger theme: how this new social class learns, assumes and changes frenchness. when josephine says, "debt can be discussed without getting full of emotion," but, "precisely, rigorously, technically," she is, in fact, describing denis' distinctive style. avoiding narrative convention, denis rejects the tradition of quality's implied sentimentality for an emphasis on time and reflection-the drift that is so popular among today's unskilled young filmmakers who distrust narrative efficiency. (if only a mumblecore film like the "post-racial" medicine for melancholy could develop similar style, audiences might be seduced into rapturous fascination with people/subjects.) yet, denis is nearly masterful. her seeming casual view of lionel's world, elliptically showing connections between people and events, is actually precise, rigorous and technically determined.

one highpoint takes place in amour jeu, a bar where lionel and his circle convince the african proprietress to open after hours. as a sociological document, this scene descends from Édouard manet's 1881 masterpiece a bar at the folies-bergère. it condenses various tensions of ethnic-urban struggle and relaxes them. the characters dance in a swirl suggesting cappuccino stains and gitanes cigarettes; its tone perfect for the rhythm of the commodores' "night shift" on the juke box-a western song that spotlights the cultural continuity maintained among african émigrés. the effect is something like the strange canadian west indian hip-hop monochrome of how she move but with more emotional detail. nothing in current art-house guru pedro costa's stylized view of immigration (a scandalous demeaning of black pathology into stylized friezes) can match denis' compassion and insight.

35 shots demonstrates denis has focused her usually amorphous interests. even the retired worker's subplot-which initiates the title's toast to pride, confidence and endurance-suggests a new world order reality more complex than even the dardennes could admit. drifting through the drama of unrooted lives, denis closely observes lionel and family's fight against alienation-as during a side trip to germany, josephine's mother's birthplace. josephine herself embodies cultural irony; a biracial beauty, she's yet a classic jeune fille like, bouchez, bonnaire and ledoyen. when denis casually introduces josephine's wedding day, the lingering close-up of the bride's neck as her father drags jewels across the nape is simultaneously erotic, cultural and political. it confirms how in denis' exotic vision, everyone is beautiful.

-- 35 shots of rum directed by claire denis at film forum sept. 16-29 runtime: 100 min.