Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of 35 Shots of Rum
2009 · Claire Denis · 35 Shots of Rum on Sightlines
A man brings home a rice cooker for his daughter. She has already bought one. So there they are, two rice cookers on the kitchen table, and neither Lionel nor Joséphine says a word about it. Denis doesn't cut to a reaction or hang a line of dialogue on it. The scene moves on. But you have understood something: this household is preparing, without admitting it, to become two households.
Deleuze borrows a pair of terms from Peirce that fit this exactly. An object we read by habit is a mark: you see a rice cooker, you expect dinner, you expect a father and a daughter eating it. A demark is the anomaly that breaks the chain, the object that stops being furniture and starts asking to be read. The second rice cooker is a demark. Denis spends a whole film's worth of feeling on it and never spends a sentence.
That economy is the method. Guy Lecorne's editing starts scenes after they have begun and leaves before they resolve, cutting away the connective tissue a normal drama uses to tell you where you are. Deleuze has a name for a cut that joins two shots across a gap rather than by continuity: an irrational cut, an interstice, a between. In Denis the between does the work. You infer histories from a glance, a nape, a pause in a stairwell.
Now the bigger claim, worth arguing rather than assuming. Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the act settles the situation. Almost all narrative film runs on this. 35 Shots of Rum has no such circuit. Lionel drives the RER out and back on the same rails. Joséphine studies, shops, waits. The thing coming for them, that she will marry and leave, is not a problem anyone can solve by acting. It can only be approached, delayed, and finally accepted. That's the time-image: film in which you feel time passing instead of watching it get spent.
Deleuze's own example of where this begins is Ozu. He credits Ozu with the first pure optical and sound situations, moments where a character has nothing to do but look and listen, like the vase held on screen in Late Spring between two expressions on a daughter's face. Denis went back to the exact films Deleuze used to date the birth of the time-image. Late Spring gives her the engine: the widowed parent who must engineer his daughter's marriage and accept the solitude that follows. An Autumn Afternoon gives her the ceremonial drink as the register in which a father says what he cannot say. She rebuilt both in a Black, working-class Paris, where the ceremony happens in a stairwell and a commuter cab.
Lionel is a seer in Deleuze's sense, a voyant: someone who watches and endures where an older cinema would have had him act. The job literalizes it. Agnès Godard's glide-by shots from the driver's cab give us a man paid to watch a line he is not permitted to leave. His face does the same work. Deleuze calls the close-up an affection-image, feeling registered but not discharged into action; when the face is immobile and reflecting rather than reacting, he calls it a qualisign, a face expressing a quality instead of a response. Alex Descas's gravity here is about as pure a qualisign as modern French cinema has. The debt is Bresson. L'Argent drains psychological performance and lets hands and objects carry meaning, and Denis runs that method through Godard's warm, telephoto attention to skin.
The film also gives duration its own stretches. Cooking plays close to real time. A train's approach takes as long as it takes. Deleuze calls these temps morts, dead time, passages where nothing advances the plot and the everyday is simply held. Akerman built that grammar in Jeanne Dielman, where domestic labour in unbroken duration became the drama itself. Denis learned the patience two more ways on set: as assistant director to Wenders on Paris, Texas, where a fractured parent-and-child bond is told in faces and silence, and to Jarmusch on Down by Law, where dead time and off-screen space are trusted to carry a scene past its narrative use.
It all converges in the café. The car dies in the rain, four people shelter in a place that has closed for the night, and the room stops being a café. Deleuze's term is any-space-whatever: a space that no longer serves as a setting for action and becomes pure potential. Nobody can do anything. Then "Nightshift" comes on and the four of them dance.
This is the film's gest, a word Deleuze takes from Brecht: the posture or attitude that makes a whole web of relations visible at once. Every bond in the film is rearranged in that dance, and not one line is spoken. The daughter moves away from the father. The neighbour from upstairs receives her. Gabrielle's unspoken love for Lionel goes where it has always gone. The Commodores are singing a lament for the dead, and Denis lets mortality drift through a scene of desire without underlining it. This is where Deleuze's late cinema of the body earns its keep: the everyday body carrying duration, attitudes instead of psychology. Denis directs bodies before voices.
And the film knows what this way of living costs. René, the colleague, retires. Without the route and the timetable he has no action left to perform, and he cannot react adequately to what his life has become. He kills himself. Deleuze called the historical moment when characters could no longer act on what they saw the crisis of the action-image. Denis puts a man inside her film who still needs a plot, and lets us watch him die without one.
What did this do to film? It showed the Ozu engine was portable: the shomin-geki, the drama of ordinary family life, survives transplant into the northern banlieue, and Black working-class France can be filmed as a family with a job and a kitchen rather than as a social problem. It showed a plot can run entirely on objects and postures. Mati Diop, whose breakthrough this was, has since gone on to direct her own films.
The title stays open. Thirty-five shots are for once in a life. Lionel drinks them at the end, after the wedding, after the letting go, and Denis never tells you which of the two he is drinking to.
Watch it again for the hands. On the throttle, on the table, on a shoulder. They say everything the film refuses to.
Concepts in play
- the time-image — Nothing anyone does resolves the coming separation: Lionel drives the same RER route out and back, Joséphine waits, and the film is 'the slow, resisted approach' to a departure no action can prevent.
- pure optical & sound situations — The stranded quartet in the shuttered café, the car dead in the rain: nobody can act, and the whole sequence proceeds without dialogue, 'expressed entirely through movement' and the Commodores' 'Nightshift'.
- voyant (the seer) — Lionel as a man employed to watch a line he cannot leave — the glide-by RER shots from the driver's cab — and Descas's 'monumental stillness', a father whose love is provision and silence rather than act.
- temps mort — Lecorne's cutting 'allow[s] an action (cooking, a train's approach) to play in near-real time', holding the everyday while the plot waits.
- espace quelconque — The shuttered café after closing, where four people take shelter from the rain: a room that has stopped functioning as a setting and becomes a field of 'shifting erotic and familial currents'.
- the gest — The near-wordless dance to 'Nightshift', which 'conveys, without a line of dialogue, the reconfiguration of every relationship in the film' — one posture exposing the whole web of bonds.
- attitudes & postures — 'Denis directs bodies as much as voices'; acting registers 'in micro-expressions and physical bearing', with bodies passing in stairwells and framed in doorways.
- icon of quality (the reflecting face) — Godard's telephoto close-ups of Descas's 'grave, weathered face', immobile and expressing a single quality rather than reacting — affect withheld from the face, per the Bressonian debt to L'Argent.
- interstice / the 'AND' — 'The film advances by omission: scenes begin after their nominal start and end before resolution, withholding the connective exposition' — meaning lives in the gap between shots, not across a continuity match.
- demark — The second rice cooker that appears after Joséphine buys the first: a domestic object whose doubling breaks the habitual chain and forces interpretation — 'a small comic-poignant sign of the doubling and separation to come'.
- crisis of the action-image — René, the retiring railway colleague, 'who cannot bear the emptiness of a life without work and takes his own life' — a man whose sensory-motor identity was the route, unable to react adequately once it is withdrawn.