35 Shots of Rum

BONDING AGENTS Diop and Descas rely on each other.

Sometimes a movie contains a single scene so perfect that it overshadows everything else. 35 Shots of Rum has one of these, and it arrives right after the halfway mark. The film’s four major characters have come together onscreen, to drive to a concert. But their car breaks down and, drenched in rain, they wander into a closing café. As the staff prepares food, they begin to dance. The Commodores’ “Nighshift” starts to play on the jukebox.

Fans of French director Denis won’t question her penchant for unlikely soundtrack selections—her use of “Rhythm of the Night” in Beau Travail (1999) remains one of cinema’s great alternatives to epinephrine. But this sequence is even better, with each movement crystallizing the film’s themes. It’s all the more stunning for appearing impromptu and effortless.

If nothing before or after lives up to it—well, what could? Denis conceived the film as an homage to Yasujiro Ozu, and she refracts his generational themes through her own sensual, elliptical sensibility. (There are minor Ozu motifs: Descas’s character is a train operator; the story is framed by an O. Henry–esque incident involving rice cookers.) Descas and Diop play a father and adult daughter who still live together and who are probably too close; Colin and Dogue are the neighbors with whom they’ve been variously entangled. This is a fragile family that must eventually fray. 35 Shots becomes a movie about the uncertainty of the future, the vanishing of the past and a brief moment in the present that approaches something like utopia.

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