rum600.jpg

“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.

Leave a Comment