FILM2001 – Short Essay: On 35 Rhums – By Julian Kopkas (SID: 510657688)

Halfway through Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, a short scene of two dances fundamentally upends
all character dynamics for the remainder of the film. This scene has embedded itself in my
memory for years. Whenever recalling it, I am struck first and foremost by a haptic sense of
tenderness. A warm resonance recalling at once the anxiety and exhilaration of important
transitional moments in my life, like meeting a group of friends who appreciated my interests
rather than chastised them, or, as depicted in 35 Rhums sequence, the moment a close
friendship suddenly progressed into a romance. From each of these memories, I recall feeling
unmoored from my prior understanding of myself: past, present, and future lost their
individual meanings and converged into a moment where I existed instead on the boarders
of each.

Potentially the most impactful element in the scene is Agnes Godard’s handheld
cinematography. Its small involuntary movements denote the presence of human hands, so
naturally attuned to the bodily mannerisms of its subjects that it appears almost as an
inseparable part of them, always in flux, synced to the same heartbeat. In her essay on The
Virgin Suicides and Elephant, Anna Backman Rogers notes that the inherent fluidity of cinema
as a medium makes it especially suited for portraying the experience of self-transformation
and change:

“The varied components that form the body of a film such as colour, light, texture, and
sound alter continually. On film bodies become protean forms in a world that is itself
in a state of flux. […] Film is able to present this becoming-other or process of
metamorphosis so well precisely because of its innately fluid qualities.” (149)

When Lionel (Alex Descas) first dances with Josephine (Mati Diop), the camera holds a
medium distance, swaying gently back and forth with them, resonating outward a sense of
calm, of an intimate but stable shared physical space. However, Noé (Grégoire Colin)’s dance
with Josephine takes a tighter frame, giving more explicit detail to gestures and looks
exchanged between the two. In close-up, it tilts up from their clasped hands to their
respective reactions – him acting uncharacteristically confident, her recognizing this but
playing along with a smile and eyeroll as she turns and rests into him. Where Josephine’s
dance with Lionel was visually coded as secure and familiar, Godard frames the space around
Josephine and Noé as fluid, exploratory, reactive to and reflective of the pair’s mutual love,
but also to their uncertainty in how or to what extent to express it. It captures the two of
them passing a physical threshold that recontextualises all previous moments together, while
passing invisibly into the future as a memory to be recalled and altered by emotions yet to be
experienced.

Twice during Josephine and Noé’s dance, we cut to Lionel observing the pair from the bar,
framed in close-up and notably shakier than any other shot in the scene. A cut from his face
to the pair intertwining their hands suggests that he too is crossing an invisible border, one
where all the time spent living with his daughter will imminently be over. While the pair of
new lovers exist on the peripheries of past, present and future together, Lionel recognizes
that very soon, memories will be all he has left. As with all of Denis’ films, no action occurs in
a vacuum, instead rippling out into details flashes that complicate or recontextualize what
was once ignored for the sake of cause-and-effect plotting.

I was 18 when I first watched 35 Rhums. At the time, I had not yet experienced the threshold
crossed by Josephine and Noé. Instead, I looked to the sequence as a sort of aspirational
memory, a roadmap of how to envision and potentially navigate future experiences;
something that I hoped not only would transpire but would do so with such evocativeness to
remain safely preserved in my own ‘image bank’ to be recalled at any time without ever
diminishing in power. However, my analysis of this sequence has reminded me that such a
linear view on experience and memory is fundamentally opposed to what drew me to the film
so much in the first place. Through its intersubjectivity and tactile formal approach, the film
constantly shifts between perspectives as if creating echoes and memories of itself.
References
Backman Rogers, Anna. “Ephemeral Bodies and Threshold Creatures: The Crisis of
the Adolescent Rite of Passage in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Gus Van Sant’s
Elephant.” NECSUS 1, no. 1, spring 2012 (2012): 148–68.
https://doi.org/10.5117/NECSUS2012.1.ROGE.

Denis, Claire, Bruno Pesery, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogué,
and Grégoire Colin. 35 rhums. New York: Cinema Guild, 2010.