NEW YORK--Lionel and his daughter, Josephine, 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 Josephine (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.
In the quiet and lovely new film, “35 Shots of Rum,” 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 Josephine 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 Miss Denis’ delicate narrative, is the one that occurs within Lionel and Josephine’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.
Miss Denis has long been interested in France’s former colonies, particularly in Africa. In films like “Chocolat” (her 1988 debut, not to be confused with the more recent Juliette Binoche-Johnny Depp confection) and “Beau Travail” (1999).
She has examined some of the political contradictions and psychological pressures of this colonial legacy, but in “35 Shots of Rum,” it remains in the background, like those classroom discussions. Which is not to say that matters of race and nationality are irrelevant to the movie, only that their relevance is implicit, either too obvious or not pressing enough for the characters themselves to discuss.
In addition to Lionel and Josephine, they include two longtime neighbors who are also suitors.
Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a chain-smoking taxi driver with high spirits and sad eyes, has been in love with Lionel for a long time, much as Noe (Gregoire Colin), a handsome slob who lives with his cat, has carried a smoldering torch for Josephine.
The father and daughter, both made more attractive by their apparent indifference to their own beauty, neither invite nor discourage romantic attention, though they must learn to find a place for it in their lives.
In its modest scope and mellow tone, “35 Shots of Rum” resembles Olivier Assayas’ “Summer Hours,” another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity.
Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.
This film is more eventful--to paraphrase an old Velvet Underground song, someone dies, and someone gets married--but its real drama is in quiet moments, in glances and whispers captured by Agnes Godard’s exquisite and expressive cinematography.
The film’s title refers to a feat of drinking that Lionel, who has an impressive ability to hold his liquor, vows to attempt on the appropriate occasion.
When the moment arrives, it is at first not clear whether he is inspired by grief or joy, but by then Miss Denis has shown how close together those emotions are, and how the melancholy strains of ordinary existence are also its sweetest music.
