35 Shots of Rum

Opening this weekend: 35 Shots of Rum, directed by Claire Denis

Synopsis from the New York Times:

35 Shots of Rum, a quiet and lovely new film by the French director Claire Denis, is concerned with 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.
— A.O. Scott

White Material

Showing this weekend at the Venice Film Festival: White Material, directed by Claire Denis

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival's website:

No more smirking. We’re stopping the bullshit right now and staying put. The regular army is preparing to reestablish order in the country. To clean up. To eliminate the rebel officer also known as the Boxeur and rid the countryside of roving child soldiers. All the expatriates have gone home, getting out before things turn nasty. Of the Vials, coffee planters who have lived here for two generations, Maria stands firm. She’s not about to give in to rumors or abandon her harvest at the first sound of gunfire. Just like her father-in-law and her exhusband who is also the father of her son (a little too much of a slacker in her opinion) she is convinced that Cherif, mayor of the neighboring town, will protect them. If she asks him he will save the plantation.

Netflix It: Chocolat

Chocolat, not to be confused with the 2000 Lasse Hallström movie of the same title, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Claire Denis’s childhood in northern Cameroon. The film opens with a shot of an African father and son playing in the surf, as a young white woman sits nearby, listening to her Walkman. The young woman, (a bit heavy-handedly) named France Dalens, has just returned to Cameroon at the beginning of the film, and most of the film plays out in extended flashback, exploring the dynamic in the household among the members of the Dalens family, their various European houseguests and their African servants. France’s mother, Aimée, and the head servant, Protée, manage to communicate (to us, and to everyone else in the film but M. Dalens) their quiet but powerful sexual attraction with a bare minimum of smoldering glances. Not exactly a plot-driven movie, Chocolat (whose title derives from 1950s French slang for being cheated) takes its time exploring the thoughtless humiliations of colonialism’s dying days (including, but obviously not limited to, public outdoors showers for the servants). Definitely worth checking out if you are in a contemplative mood, Chocolat is the first film of a trilogy that includes S’en fout la mort and J’ai pas sommeil.

 A plus for Francophiles: the DVD has the option of French subtitles.

There's an interesting essay about the film here, and an interview with Claire Denis about Chocolat and S'en fout la mort here, but be forewarned: there are minor spoilers. (However, as noted, it's not like there is a twist ending or any shocking revelations.) Also, the New York Times loved the hell out of this movie back in 1988.