Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

chaos-rampant I was looking for another film by this filmmaker, promised to two readers. Unable to find it, I turned to this. I count myself lucky. It's potent stuff if you can place yourself inside. One possible way is to note the Ozu influence. Most comments mention it. It's in the quiet family life between widowed father and his only daughter, in the dispassionate eye that gently embraces rhythms, in the lack of ego and hurt among the participants. He a train driver, attuned to a calm linear life that he controls, she a sociologist student, opening up to exploring and conceptualizing her ideas about things. This is all a great entry, Denis films warmth, equanimity, assurance in simply the presence of two people together. There's no dissatisfaction in the routine, no loneliness in the solitude. Denis has adopted Zen indirectly via cinematic Ozu, this character is not apparent in another of her films I've seen, which only affirms that she's open and agile in her work, refusing to settle.That's all fine in itself, I'll have this in my home over existential rumination every time, but Ozu is a bit more than tender tea in composed form. He begins with a rhythm that sets the spatiotemporal mechanism, and only after we have acquired presence does he introduce the dramatic event, usually a single one, usually marriage. The deeper thrust is that we'll go around that bend with more clarity than usual, registering transition in a cosmic way. A Japanese girl deciding on marriage was deciding on her future life after all; this needs to settle as deeply in us.This is all about cosmic transition, albeit in even softer strokes. A larger family has been introduced in between, another woman who has feelings for the widower, a boy who has feelings for the girl. They all live in the same building. There's a lovely spatial fabric that brings them together, for instance the boy coming up the stairs pauses in the hall and intently stares at the girl's door, the intensity is that he's not just looking at a piece of wood but through that, intently as if to part the image, into the space of a possible life beyond. So this isn't about just rhythm and composed space. It's about the neighbor woman smoking at her window hoping to see the man but not being sure this is it.It all comes together in a marvelous scene of dancing in a small neighborhood bar, a crank has been thrown in their concert plans for the evening, their car that breaks down, so life spontaneously resumes on the spot to figure itself out. The deeper thrust is that they all have to go on. The father has to let his daughter go, the girl has to move on from the family nest, the boy has to come to terms that he might have to move on alone, the neighbor woman move on without making her feelings known. A train colleague receives his pension as the film starts, he also has to move on but can't envision another life ahead; sure enough he's discovered near the end dead on the tracks by the father.The game with 35 shots is another entry; they do it, the father muses in a bar, to mark something that only happens once, life in a broader sense.The ending poses a conundrum. You'll probably have a sense of what Denis is trying to accomplish by that point. She has removed the one thing that significantly held Ozu back, explaining from the outside. So she's looking to embody the transition that is more than an event. Indirectly this brings her in line with every other filmmaker currently worth knowing in the attempt to create a new visual logic for becoming conscious. Denis is uniquely equipped in having seen Tarkovsky at work. So the film becomes muddled, crispness must go at that point. The whole idea is that they are both in the end still unsure about it, this is anchored in the nervous image of the boy in the hall. Did she do it?

Pierre Radulescu This movie has the subtlety and tenderness of a miniature painting. The charm is hidden in infinitesimal details.The long opening sequence that watches without haste commuter trains running toward the large city calls in mind Ozu, and, yes, the movie is a tribute to the great Japanese master: a replica to Late Spring, offering at least two surprises.Firstly, it's Ozu filtered through the lens of Hou Hsiao-Hsien: a replica to Late Spring calling in mind Café Lumière; a French director reenacting a Japanese classic with the sensibility of a modern Taiwanese.Secondly, while transplanting the Japanese movie from 1949 in today's Paris, 35 Rhums explores other potentialities of the story. Which opens new horizons: after all, the choices made by the heroes in Late Spring raise questions with multiple answers.Like in Late Spring there is a widowed father with a daughter in her twenties. The father is of African descent, a train engineer at RER (the transit system around Paris). The daughter is studying anthropology. Like in Late Spring, both have a quiet middle-class life in the outskirts of the big city. For the father the same dilemma: realizing that the daughter should leave him and make her own life. Like in Late Spring, there is a prospect groom for the daughter, also a prospect new wife for the father. The friend who got remarried in Late Spring (a warning against loneliness) became in 35 Rhums a coworker just retired and getting quickly alienated by solitude. Even the father's assistant from Late Spring, briefly viewed as a possible match for the girl, is appearing here in 35 Rhums: a colleague of the daughter, briefly trying to date her.The two stories keep (loosely) the same line. The quiet and warm everyday between father and daughter is disrupted by a chain of totally unconnected events leading to the same conclusion: the daughter will build her own life, the father will face loneliness (getting space now for the 35 shots of rum). Even the trip made by father and daughter before her marriage can be found in both movies: a trip that offers the chance to talk about the long missing mother. The trip in Late Spring is to the ancient city of Kyoto, while in 35 Rhums it is to mother's birthplace: a German town that kept its medieval allure. But the similarities between the two movies end here.Unlike the Japanese classic, 35 Rhums is not interested at all in the plot. Without making the connection to Late Spring you wouldn't get it too much. You would realize at some point that both father and daughter speak also German fluently, you should then realize that the mother was (maybe) born in Germany, you wouldn't get it what's with the 35 shots of whatever, and were you to be too stubborn, you wouldn't even get it who's getting eventually married with whom.And that is because for the French director it is the web of human relationships that counts. Human relations, their warmth, their potentialities, never totally fulfilled, the never told dreams and hopes, the brief looks that speaks tones of volumes where words would say nothing, this is what Claire Denis is looking for in this movie. Discovering the unseen light that comes from within, celebrating it as infinite joy, and infinite ambiguity, of love; celebrating the mundane as scene for this ambiguous, pure, infinite, love. It's Ozu seen through the lens of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a classic story subtly re-told with contemporary sensibility.This fluidity of the plot offers room for ambiguity: ambiguity of what's happening, ambiguity of sentiments. Father and daughter have built a universe of their own where they feel perfectly fine, all other relations (the father with the woman who loves him, the daughter with the man whom she eventually will marry) are kept in some sort of a backup, never rejected, never properly treated, just delaying them for later, for that 'you never know'. This while all feel that time never stops, never comes back, never repeats lost occasions.There is a superb scene that shows all this. Father and daughter, along with their prospects, are going to a concert. The car breaks, it's raining hardly, and they notice a small African restaurant. It's closed, they knock at the door, the owner reopens for them. A drink to get warmed, while the owner prepares some quick dishes, they start to dance, the father with his girlfriend, then with his daughter, the young man with the daughter, the father with the young waitress, each pair is exhaling a sense of intimacy noted with a vague discomfort by the others, while this intimacy is actually filling the whole space, is conquering everybody.Well, you would ask me what's about with the 35 shots of rum? C'est une vieille histoire (it's an old story) says the father when asked... but you should see the movie for yourselves to understand.

Pan32 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums), Claire Denis, 2008, continues Denis' portrayal of Europeans of African ancestry with this quietly unfolding parable of a daughters deep love of her father and his pangs of guilt in accepting her companionship (he is a widower) which he comes to see is an unhealthy dependency preventing her from forming her own emotional life with her boyfriend. The scene is a Parisian apartment building in which Jo and her father Lionel share friendships with Noe, Jo's boyfriend, and Gabrielle, a single woman who drives her own taxi. The obvious parings are prevented from developing by Jo'e inertia brought on by her contentment with the arrangement and the resolution hinges on the death of Noe's cat and the discovery of by Jo of a note from Gabrielle to Lionel. The films attractions are the expected artistry of Cinematographer Agnes Godard and the deft direction of Denis in which emotions and attitudes are conveyed with great economy. Denis uses imagery of movement throughout the film as Lionel is a commuter train engineer who uses a motorcycle for personal transport; Gabrielle drives her taxi; and Jo rides trains to her classes. There is a brief moment of something like magic realism with Jo and her father on horse back galloping down the underground tracks. All this contrasts with the quiet lives at the apartment. One odd note is the depiction of Jo at classes where the subject of the monetary domination of the northern countries over the southern. The word revolution is mentioned and a brief scene of a protest is inserted art one point. This contrasts, consciously or not, with a decidedly up scale apartment with furnishings that suggest a background far different from a train engineer. Except for her film Chocolate, I never noticed any overt socio/ political agenda in her films.

M A I like it when the movie title itself is capable of concisely threading together the themes of the movie and yet retains a unique symbolic connotation. "35 shots of rum" is a good example. The audience were left with a question mark as to what the "35 shots of rum theory" meant to the father early on in the movie, and when leaving the cinema were probably rewarded with a sonorous answer which neatly highlights and summarises the point of the movie.In a working class Parisian family which is disintegrated by the loss of an important member, what bonds the remaining members together and keep them going? What prevents them from lying flat on the rail and let trains run all over them and wrap them up as some may choose to? "35 shots of rum" provides us with a sincere, heartfelt and highly humanised conjecture through unraveling an intimate web of relationships within the family and the neighbourhood, and reveals to the audience what meanings of life are to the characters. The story-telling is commendable and loyal to its central film throughout, making the film a structurally condensed and coherent piece of study of humanity.