35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums)
2008 (France)
Director: Claire Denis
Claire Denis’ newest film, 35 Shots of Rum, exhibits a remarkable humanism that takes its time uncoiling and working its spell on you. With an unhurried and affectionate tone, the film weaves the story of a sagging Parisian apartment complex, where widower Lionel (Alex Descas) and his adult daughter Jospehine (Mati Diop) alternately resist and welcome the changes that life brings. Denis demonstrates a profound emotional grace in her approach, coaxing us to share her love of her characters by permitting us to see them without pretense or flattering poses. There is no cloying demand that we share Jo’s fondness for her father. Rather, Denis bestows that fondness on the viewer by shooting Descas in a way that captures the gentleness and pain of his inner life. 35 Shots of Rum succeeds because of its modesty: there is no sense that Denis has constructed this intimate tale for our benefit, and its simple themes are wondrously emergent. Only a shocking and gratuitous development late in the film mars the pleasures of Denis’ empathic observational power, but she rights things with a melancholy, ambiguous coda that nonetheless underlines her story with admirable precision.
Three Monkeys (Üç maymun)
2008 (Turkey)
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Noir doesn’t come much more languid than Three Monkeys, a moody Turkish thriller that concerns itself as much with hidden ugliness as it does with naked emotional upheavals. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan sketches this story of loyalty and lust with the thinnest of narrative lines, but via a style that practically howls its themes to the moon. Hence the florid, queasy detail captured with his HD video: slick sweat on greasy skin, lifeless urban spaces of yellow and green, and cloudy skies that seem almost bruised. There are dabs of magical realism as well, as a harrowing specter lurches through and clings to the lives of the principals. Shut up in a cramped apartment but miles away from each other, loutish husband Eyüp, dissatisfied wife Hacer, and troubled son Ismail contend with a maze of lies, all flowing from Eyüp’s fateful decision to take the fall for his boss’s hit-and-run accident. Ceylan doesn’t add sufficient dramatic energy to the proceedings to justify the film’s ostentatious pacing, and Three Monkeys never feels like it connects with his thematic ambitions. Still, as a lusciously stylized–and often deliciously ugly–glimpse of human folly, it’s satisfactory.
Andrew: Fantastic capsule of 35 SHOTS OF RUM, which I saw two weeks ago at the Film Forum, and ironically which just arrived Friday on a Region 2 DVD, which I will be anxious to re-view. That observational power you speak of has characterized Denis’s work right on down from her first film, CHOCOLAT.