'35 Shots of Rum': A small family unit's bittersweet evolution

Lionel and his daughter, Joséphine, live in a high-rise housing project on the outskirts of Paris. Lionel (Alex Descas), a widower, works for the commuter-rail system, while Joséphine (Mati Diop) attends a university. She and her classmates debate about colonialism, resistance and relations between the industrialized world and "the global South," as they try to make sense of a world that is both distant and immediate.

"35 Shots of Rum," a quiet and lovely new film by the French director Claire Denis, is partly concerned with measuring that distance, the bewildering chasm between 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, political economy and change.

But the more salient change that shapes Denis' delicate narrative is the one that occurs within Lionel and Joséphine's relationship as they undertake a gradual separation after years of solitary intimacy.

The title refers to a feat of drinking that Lionel vows to attempt on the appropriate occasion. When the moment arrives, it is at first not clear whether he is inspired by grief or joy, but by then Denis has shown how close together those emotions are, and how the melancholy strains of ordinary existence are also its sweetest music.