Wednesday Minute
No. 34 | February 17, 2010

Women Behind the Camera I

Our theme this week
Women directors of notable films from 2009

Featured this week
Monday         —   Lone Scherfig
Tuesday         —   Nora Ephron

Claire Denis

The essentials
Notable 2009 film:  35 Shots of Rum.

Claire Denis was born in Paris but raised in Africa, and drew from that experience in her debut film Chocolat (1988), about a young French girl living in Cameroon, where her father is a colonial administrator.  The film explores the boundaries that exist between the French and the people of Cameroon, and the tensions that arise when people move beyond those limits.  The film was a selection at Cannes and nominated for a César Award.  Another of her films, also set in Africa, is Beau Travail (1999), which adapts Herman Melville’s Billy Budd but transplants its maritime story to Djibouti.

Denis’s film 35 Shots of Rum screened at the Toronto Film Festival and at Venice, then received a limited release.  It’s one of the best-reviewed films of last year.  (Its score at Metacritic is 92.)   The film stars Alex Descas and Mati Diop as Lionel and Joséphine, a man from Africa living with his daughter on the outskirts of Paris.  The story explores their relationship, their love, their dependency, and eventually their need for change.  Again drawing from her own life, Denis based the story in part on her mother and grandfather’s relationship.  Denis’s style—a minimum of dialogue, long takes, a meditative tone—was influenced by Japanese masterYasujiro Ozu, and 35 Shots of Rum is an homage to his work, particularly Late Spring (1949).

Beyond the final credits
Claire Denis’s Chocolat is not related to the 2000 Lasse Hallström film Chocolat starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.  In the Hallström film, chocolat is chocolate the confection.  In the Denis film, chocolat is a French slang term meaning both “dark-skinned” and ”to be cheated,” referring to the fate of people living under French rule; it is not just the Cameroonians who suffer.

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35 Shots of Rum (2009)
Claire Denis, director

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Talking with Ozu (1993)
Claire Denis, on Yasujiro Ozu

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Quote of Note
“One day when my mother and father were singing together in the forest, a great storm blew up out of nowhere.  But so passionate was their singing that they did not notice, nor did they stop as the rain began to fall, and when their voices rose for the final bars of the duet a great bolt of lighting came out of the sky and struck my father so that he lit up like a torch.  And at the same moment my father was struck dead my mother was struck dumb!  She never spoke another word.”
—Flora McGrath (Anna Paquin), The Piano (1993)

…58…59…60.