REVIEW:
Lionel and his daughter, Joséphine, live in a tidy and comfortable apartment in a high-rise housing project on the outskirts of Paris. Lionel (Alex Descas), a widower and a man of few words, works for the commuter rail system, while Joséphine (Mati Diop) studies social sciences at university. She and her classmates debate about colonialism, resistance and relations between the industrialized world and “the global South,” dropping names like Frantz Fanon and Joseph Stiglitz as they try to make sense of a world that is both distant and immediate.
35 SHOTS OF RUM, a quiet and lovely new film by the French director Claire Denis, is partly concerned with measuring that distance, the bewildering chasm between huge and tumultuous international movements and individual lives. It is self-evident that the story of Joséphine and Lionel, an African immigrant whose wife was German, is bound up in a complicated history of demographics and political economy. The fact that nearly all of the characters in this film are French while few are white is a further index of how the European landscape has changed in recent decades.
But the more salient change, the one that shapes Ms. Denis’s delicate narrative, is the one that occurs within Lionel and Joséphine’s relationship. It has to do with universally recognizable but nonetheless highly particular shifts in emotional weather, as a child and her parent undertake a gradual separation after years of solitary intimacy. nytimes
