Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
The Phenomenology of the Soul: 35 Shots of Rum
Tony McKibbin
Claire Denis has always been a great director of looks and glances and yet at the same time a fine filmmaker of hinted substance. Whether in Beau travail (1999), as we're offered shards of a personality, or in Trouble Every Day (2002) where we're given selves fragmented by cannibalistic desire, Denis' allusive style searches the subtleties of the soul. We can perhaps go as far as to say that part of her distinctiveness lies in an inversion of a Hitchcockian problematic noticed by a number of commentators of the master's work. This is the Humean issue of relations, where internal elements are irrelevant next to external purpose. For example Gilles Deleuze notes in Cinema 1-The Movement Image that what interested Hitchcock was not "who did the action...but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught." For Hume the set of relations allows us to trust in appearances and not needlessly concern ourselves with the notion of substance: "...what must a philosopher think of those vain reasoners, who instead of regarding the present scene of things as the sole object of their contemplation, so far reverse the whole course of nature, as to render this life merely a passage to something farther..."? In Rear Window (1954), L. B. Jefferies's looks and glances lead to the piecing together of the story as a murderer is uncovered. What matters isn't at all the murderer's inner motivations, but Jefferies's accumulation of external observations. Even in films like Psycho (1960) and Marnie (1964), the ‘psychological' Norman Bates and Marnie are still narrative ciphers, their behaviour furthering story instead of countering it. Bates' Oedipal complex is a plot twist, and Marnie's kleptomania an opportunity to use psychoanalysis as plot device. Marnie's cure is Hitchcock's narrative wrap-up; plot logic meets psycho-logic.
This isn't at all to undermine Hitchcock: as he said, there are story directors and character directors. He saw himself concerned with story, and the looks and glances go into creating supposition, anticipation and expectation. What is the dog sniffing out in Rear Window? Will someone discover the dead body in the trunk in Rope (1948)? As we cut to Jefferies' enquiring look in Rear Window, we are meant to be working the story out in our head just as Jefferies is doing the same in his. When the two killers in Rope look like they might be found out, the exchange of glances leads us to share their anxiety at the thought of being discovered. In each instance Hitchcock creates knowing suspense. As he once proposed in a piece called Let ‘em Play God, "if the audience does know, if they have been told all the secrets that the characters do not know, they'll work like the devil for you because they know what fate is facing the poor actors." He adds that in Rope the audience knows right away that the two young men have committed a murder, so much of the suspense lies elsewhere. Even in Rear Window, we're pretty sure L. B. is onto something and simply wait to find out how that something will be played out. "I do not believe", the maestro insisted, "that puzzling the audience is the essence of suspense" .
Alex Descas and Claire Denis
But what might unknowing suspense be like, and does part of Denis's importance rest in her capacity not to eliminate substance through relations but to create it through making the relations as puzzling as possible? In an interview in Senses of Cinema about 35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums, 2008), Denis says of the actor Alex Descas that "Alex, for me, has something close to Chishu Ryu in Ozu's films, a sort of aloofness or secret," before adding in the same interview that the feeling behind the film came from remembering her much-loved grandfather. "He came from Amazonia and had this dark air." The only actor she could "imagine being as good as my grandfather was Alex." How to explore the secret of the actor with the goodness of her grandfather, how to find a form that could give substance to the nature of goodness and retain the secret that Descas carries so well within him? If Hitchcock's looks and glances lead to the visual telling of a story, do Denis' looks and glances allow for the accumulation of substantial feeling?
In the sixties there was a "new type of character for a new cinema," Deleuze notes in Cinema 2 - The Time Image. "What happens to them does not belong to them and only half concerns them, because they know how to extract from the event that part that cannot be reduced to what happens..." In such a character, and curiously an insubstantial character next to the psychologically and morally robust people we find in most story-driven films, substance can emerge. If we think of the first few minutes of 35 Shots of Rum, we might think Denis is setting up the sociological plausibility of her leading character as we can work out the environment in which he lives and travails. Yet strictly speaking in these first few minutes of Denis showing us trains passing and shots of the tracks from inside the train, we cannot tell Descas's character Lionel is a train driver at all. The only person we see inside the train's driving cabin is, we will later realize, Lionel's friend, soon to retire. As in other Denis films, including Trouble Every Day and Vendredi Soir (2002), the director doesn't set the scene in accordance with character, and allow for the immediate development of the story, but instead sets the feeling, the tonal sense of longing that permeates her work. Such an approach has nothing to do with what in script-guru Robert McKee's definition a character wants. "The protagonist's will impels a known desire" he proposes in Story. Indeed, we could reformulate this in Denis's work as an impelling of an unknown desire, and this is consistent with Deleuze's observation on a new type of character.
If we think of the early stages of these three Parisian set films - Trouble Every Day, Vendredi Soir and 35 Shots of Rum - we note that the music and mise-en-scène create not the sort of spaces to accomodate the protagonist's will, but an empty space for yearning. In Trouble Every Day we are introduced to the cityscape as Denis' films images of the Seine; in Vendredi soir it is the rooftops of Paris, in 35 Shots of Rum it is the railway tracks. Character here is subordinated to mise-en-scène as though Denis wanted to propose that characterisation is less important than absorption in space. It is as though she needs to create enough space to indicate longing over the sort of cinema that implies will. Yet doesn't Hitchcock introduce to us to space over character at the beginning of Rear Window, as we're shown the courtyard and Jefferies' room before we're properly introduced to L. B. himself? Yet what Hitchcock quickly offers us is knowing frustration as the wheelchair-bound Jefferies becomes fascinated by what is outside the window. Frustration is still consistent with will and Hitchcock wants us to feel Jefferies' irritation at being stuck in one place with his leg in plaster. When McKee says if you could take your protagonist aside and whisper in his ear, he would be able to tell you what he wants, Jefferies would want to be able to walk around, just as he would later add the wish to go over to the opposite apartment and investigate the murder he surmises to have taken place there. The character knows and the audience is knowing. The space represents in Rear Window the frustration of the character; in Denis' film it signifies something else: the yearning of feeling.
It is the way Denis sets up her cinematic spaces as somehow greater than character, somehow more emotional than practical, and the looks and glances of her characters signifying so much more than will and drive, which gives her work its mystery. This is clearly the case in what is surely the key sequence in the film, the Denis equivalent of Hitchcock's set-piece, and one that reveals of course not the motives of the characters, but the texture of their longings. As Lionel, his daughter, their neighbour Gabrielle, and another neighbour, and the daughter's friend Noé, go to a restaurant/bar after their car breaks-down on their way to a concert, so the various characters in the bar dance or listen to the Commodores' Night Shift, and we have the shades of emotion reflected in the half light of the bar's interiors. If Renoir insisted that everyone has their reasons, Denis might re-couch it as everybody has their secrets. For example in one moment we see Lionel and Josephine dancing before he gives Josephine over to Noé, and as he does so we notice almost a smirk of satisfaction on Lionel's face. A moment later, as we cut to Lionel, he has a pensive, even worried look on his visage. Earlier in the film when Josephine comes home and notices that he seems a bit drunk, he says he is fighting fire with fire as Denis again hints at feeling but doesn't reveal it: what fire is inside him exactly that the alcohol is supposed to assuage, or complement? Shortly after that pensive look in the scene in the bar, he dances with the beautiful owner, a woman we've noticed him looking at previously, during an initial visit to the bar slightly earlier in the evening, and so we have no idea whether that look is about his daughter with Noé, his own hope of dancing with the woman who runs the bar, his work, or his ex-wife who has passed away some time in the past. The gap between the smirk and the pensive look seems so wide that it's as if the continuity cutting cannot quite close it. It certainly looks as if Lionel is looking at his daughter dancing, but there is mystery in Lionel's gaze. If Hitchcock believed the essence of suspense lay in not puzzling the audience, does the essence of feeling lie in puzzling the viewer, as a character's feelings remain their own, and we must muse over the nature of those emotions? Even when a character would seem to have a clear yearning for another (as Gabrielle has for Lionel), this needn't lead to surface revelations; more a stricken look that carries with it a world of feeling beyond the moment.
It is often Denis' very fragmentary style that allows for feelings to remain half-hidden. For example, a narrative thread would seem to be developing with a young man who hoped to go to the concert with Josephine. He turns up at her door with flowers, and wonders whether she would like to go to the show. She says she has already planned to go with her father, Noé and Gabrielle, and so we assume they will see each other there as Denis indicates enough emotional tension between Josephine and the young man for it to suggest a developing plot strand. But of course the car breaks down and they spend the evening in the bar instead, and nothing more is heard of the man who asked her out. In another filmmaker's work this could be slack craftsmanship and insensitive characterisation. But in Denis' it is consistent because relations and their logical interconnectedness interest her less than the crystallized moment that creates feeling, that hints at a character's substance. We may muse over whether it allows Josephine to realize how much Noé likes her as he jokes about the flowers in the back of the car on the way to the concert, and how little Josephine cares about her possible suitor as she ends up in the bar and dances with Noé. Perhaps. Now Denis is often perceived as an aesthetically fresh, fragmentary filmmaker. Catherine Wheatley in Sight and Sound reckons the film "lacks the formal ambition and willingness to push boundaries that has brought her such critical acclaim in the past", but are her films formally ambitious, especially, or emotionally interrogatory? Does any formal ambition not come out of the specifics of feeling, of trying to give substance to her characters, to look beyond their surfaces even if that may be all we have to work with? While Beau travail was admired for its fractured narrative, Denis talked of the need to understand something of her central character's feelings and thoughts. As she said, when Denis and her scriptwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau "work on the script, the main thing we do is figure out the points of view. We're always seeing something through someone else's eyes." This suggests that any fragmentation comes out of character, and so where in a film like Beau travail this came partly from restructuring the story, here the story is chronological and can thus appear less ambitious.
Yet the film may be chronologically arranged, but that doesn't mean it is devoid of ellipses. Sometimes we're not sure how much time has passed between scenes. In one, Lionel talks to his now retired friend about having dark thoughts and says, when he has them he thinks about his daughter. The next scene shows a dream-like sequence of Lionel and Josephine on horseback, and the scene after that shows Lionel discovering his friend dead on the track - having committed suicide. The cause and effect here would seem to be that Lionel can keep dark thoughts from his mind by superimposing positive ones about his daughter onto them; the friend isn't so lucky and his black moods that we've had hints of throughout lead to his demise. Denis offers this quite elliptically, however, for we are not sure how much time has passed between the conversation and the friend's death, and cannot say exactly what type of image the dream-like sequence happens to be. Denis has called it a dream, but as it comes not when Lionel is sleeping, but apparently while he is driving, it is closer to a reverie.
Earlier, though, we reckoned that space is more important than character in Denis' films, and she has always insisted "I never use the landscape separately from the characters." How can we square the circle of fragmentation coming from character, and characterization that is less important than screen space? We need to return to two of our earlier observations. One, that Denis is first and foremost a director of looks and glances, which is consistent with Hitchcock, and, second, that we need a new type of character for a new cinema as Deleuze noted, which is antithetical to the Hitchcockian. This new type of character cannot push the story along, but neither can they quite exist psychologically either. They occupy space but don't quite dictate it, and so it is as if Denis needs to find the type of spaces in which characters can yearn, where this incompleteness can be registered in the places she films. If we return to the scene in the café we can understand this issue a little better. Here is a completely contingent space that brings out the subtle registers of feeling within the characters. If the car hadn't broken down they would have gone to the concert, and if the car had broken down anywhere else they would have ended up in another bar. Now obviously while for the characters such a moment is contingent, we can't pretend that it is completely arbitrary on the director's part. This is the set-piece centre point of Denis' film, and yet a filmmaker moving towards the assertiveness of narrative, character and place is likely to utilise not contingent spaces but categorical spaces. One thinks here of Hitchcock's use of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959), the sanctuary at Westminster Cathedral in Foreign Correspondent (1940), the tower in Vertigo (1958). These are all categorical spaces where characters meet through the machinations of someone. In many of Denis' films the contingent is more important than the motivational, spatial chance proves more significant than characterisational specifics. This is the case when two strangers meet in a traffic jam in Vendredi soir, in the bar scene that seems to turn Galoup to jealous fury in Beau travail, and the plane crashing near the central character's home in Chocolat (1988).
Perhaps one reason why we find scenes like the one in the bar so moving is because they are deeply significant for the characters and at the same time accidental. For example, if Noé had engineered the car breaking down as a way of making sure that Josephine wouldn't meet with the interested beau at the concert, we would no longer be in a contingent situation of course but a motivated one. We offer this absurd and extreme alternative only to understand that Denis doesn't want to work with strongly motivated characters, but situationally contingent ones. Even perhaps her most manipulative character, Galoup in Beau travail, is refracted in such a way that his motivations become abstract. Hitchcock wants strong motivations to show the surface of things; Denis wants weak motivations to examine the undercurrent of events. Hitchcock wouldn't want unnecessarily to confuse the viewer; part of Denis' art is to create a sense of bafflement, what we might call a productive bafflement. It produces in us hypotheses of feeling, not of narrative anticipation. If Hitchcock's is often a deterministic universe, working out the inevitability of its premise; Denis' is a world of the possible, working through the permutations of feeling. In the bar scene the looks and glances are a mixture of the ambivalent, the yearning and the forlorn. At least five characters have the agency of the look here, Lionel, Josephine, Noé, Gabrielle and the woman who runs the restaurant. This isn't so much a case of point of view, which is mainly Lionel's and momentarily Gabrielle's, more that each character has their own emotional centre in the scene which is consistent with Denis' earlier claim that she and Forgeau are always working out the perspective. This seems to be about not what people are thinking about doing - as in motivation - but what they are feeling - as in longing.
Now Hitchcock famously said that if you have two people sitting at a table, you just have two people sitting at a table, but put a bomb under that table and suddenly you have suspense. The equivalent of the bomb in the café scene in 35 Shots of Rum would have been Noé deliberately doing something to the car so that it would have broken down, and while the characters might obliviously be working through their feelings towards each other, underpinning the scene would be the urgency of wondering whether they would find out about Noé's manipulations. Again we exaggerate our case to try and understand Denis' achievement, and the way one can hint at substance on screen. Deleuze's proposition that there was a new type of character in film was closely allied to the idea that characters no longer had motivations, but instead often indiscernible yearnings that the filmmaker searched out spatially. In The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), any back story the protagonist offers about her life seems irrelevant next to the spaces she tries to occupy. In Accatone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961) the leading character is less motivated by ready wants, than situated within a context for a broader desire, alluded to in Pasolini's use of Bach and a cinematic style that remains aloof to the character's own agency. When Andrè Bazin so beautifully proposed that "one can look at La Strada as a phenomenology of the soul", we can add that in some ways that is exactly what much modern cinema has been doing: to illuminate less the social body and its social relations, more the private self in all its internal manifestations over its outward motivations. Such a cinema is of course an act of faith, a faith even in the act of its making. "Sometimes you put a lot of energy and, yet, something is missing," Denis says in an interview in the book Talking Movies. "And sometimes you put a lot of energy and something comes out of it." More than a little comes out of 35 Shots of Rum. But not so much that the film's secrets, and especially Lionel's, are entirely revealed.
Tony McKibbin is an independent writer and teacher who writes for The List in Edinburgh and various film and literary journals worldwide.