Rassegna stampa di Yasujirô Ozu

THE French filmmaker Claire Denis remembers well the first time she encountered the work of Yasujiro Ozu. She was in her mid-20s — “quite late,” she said, for a serious film buff to be introduced to one of the titans of world cinema — and the movie was “An Autumn Afternoon” (1962), the last that Ozu completed.
“I had been told he was a sacred master, so I went in with a sort of religious feeling,” Ms. Denis said in a recent telephone interview from Paris. “But I was amazed to find something very pure and simple, something that could be shared immediately with almost no words. It was of another time and another culture, but the feelings were so familiar. It was like going home somehow.”
The shock of recognition hit even harder several years later when she caught “Late Spring” during an Ozu retrospective in Paris. This 1949 film, often ranked among Ozu’s greatest, observes the deep attachment between a middle-aged widower (Chishu Ryu) and his grown daughter (Setsuko Hara), a scenario that Ozu would revisit, although in a different emotional register, with “An Autumn Afternoon.”
“I was extremely touched but not exactly aware why at first,” Ms. Denis said. She recalls smoking a cigarette outside the theater afterward with her friend, the actor Alex Descas, and telling him, “This is my story.” Or to be precise, the story of Ms. Denis’s mother, who was raised by her widowed father.
Ms. Denis’s grandfather came to Paris from Brazil as an art student; he fell in love and married a French woman, who died when their daughter was a baby. “He was an extraordinary man, really attractive, not at all French,” Ms. Denis said. “He gave his life to my mother. For her he was always the only man, and even my father knew that.”

For years Ms. Denis mulled the idea of a film that, as she put it, “grew under the shade of ‘Late Spring’ ” to tell “the story I knew, which my mother had told me so many times.” Ms. Denis said she had her reservations — “maybe the story is too tiny, maybe the world today is too different” — but was eventually emboldened by a few factors. Mr. Descas, whom she called “the closest guy I know to Chishu Ryu” — Ozu’s favorite actor — was getting to be the right age. She also saw Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Café Lumière” (2003), a film commissioned for Ozu’s centenary that paid due respect to the master without succumbing to imitation.
Despite its borrowed premise “35 Shots of Rum,” which opens Sept. 16 at Film Forum in Manhattan, is one of Ms. Denis’s most personal movies: at once a homage to a beloved filmmaker and a filial gift to her mother. The film’s father figure, Lionel (Mr. Descas, who has now appeared in six of Ms. Denis’s features), is a train driver working the commuter routes on the outskirts of Paris. He shares a modest apartment, and a life of tacit, mutual devotion, with his daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop), a university student. But beyond their cozy domestic existence lie threats and temptations, connections to the outside world that are sure to weaken their bond.
One neighbor, Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), used to be romantically involved with Lionel and still carries a torch for him. Another, Noé (Grégoire Colin, also a familiar face from Ms. Denis’s films), is working up the nerve to make a move on Joséphine.
Lionel’s occupation is both a nod to Ozu, who included trains and train stations in almost all of his films, and a key to his character, Ms. Denis said. “You have to be very concentrated on the job because of the responsibility to your passengers,” she said. “But you’re driving that train alone, so it gives you time to think. When I was writing the script and met some drivers, they told me that when you have dark moments, it’s not a good job to have.”
The film is filled with meditative shots of railway tracks diverging and converging. They were shot by the cinematographer Agnès Godard from the driver’s compartment with a hand-held camera, creating, as Ms. Denis put it, “a rhythm inside a rhythm, with the movement of the camera and the movement of the carriage and the tracks.”
Rhythms, textures and moods — the intangibles of the art — have been increasingly important in Ms. Denis’s films, which are typically structured as oblique accumulations of vivid incidents. She has applied her allusive tone-poem approach, predicated on minimal dialogue and maximum atmosphere, to a wide range of subjects and styles.
“Beau Travail” (1999), her critical breakthrough, transposes Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” to a French Foreign Legion camp in the deserts of Djibouti. “Trouble Every Day” (2001) is a gory, lusty exercise in vampire erotica. “Friday Night” (2002) is a swooning, relatively discreet account of a magical brief encounter. “The Intruder” (2004), her boldest foray into narrative abstraction, follows its protagonist on a journey, as much mental as physical, from the Alps to South Korea to the Polynesian islands, all the while refusing to distinguish between objective reality and metaphoric hallucinations.
The director Jim Jarmusch, who has known Ms. Denis since she worked as an assistant director on his 1986 film “Down by Law,” zeroed in on a central contradiction in her work. “There’s a kind of dryness that’s appealing, an avoidance of clichéd drama,” he said, “and yet there’s something very sensual and almost tactile.”
Though more straightforward than Ms. Denis’s recent films, “35 Shots of Rum” is no less committed to visual over verbal storytelling. “It’s not that I don’t like words,” she said. “There’s sometimes no need for words.”
The best example of this in “35 Shots” is a precisely orchestrated, near-wordless sequence in which the four main characters seek shelter from the rain in a small restaurant. When “Night Shift” by the Commodores comes on, they get up to dance. Glances are exchanged, partners traded, and the relationships among the quartet are realigned before our eyes.
The film sprang from “a real story, real facts and feelings, and in that sense it was easy,” Ms. Denis said. But even a comparatively opaque work like “ The Intruder,” she added, “was very simple in my mind, more than people think.”
It may be because her process is largely intuitive that Ms. Denis likes to surround herself with the same people on each film. Actors include Mr. Descas, Mr. Colin and Isaach de Bankolé. Ms. Godard, whom she met on the set of Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas” (1984), has shot almost all her features. And the lush, melancholic compositions of the British orchestral-pop band Tindersticks have accompanied most of her films since “Nenette and Boni” (1996).
Ms. Denis recently worked with another cinematographer on a project, “White Material,” starring Isabelle Huppert as the owner of a coffee plantation in an unnamed war-torn African country. (It is the third of Ms. Denis’s films to be set in Africa; her father was a diplomat, and she spent much of her childhood in Cameroon.) Ms. Godard did not want to travel because her mother was dying, but the two teamed up again on “35 Shots.” (“White Material,” which Ms. Denis shot before “35 Shots” but only just finished editing, will have its premiere at the Venice Film Festival this week; it will also be shown at the Toronto and New York festivals.)
“People ask if we’re tired of each other, like we’re a couple,” Ms. Denis said of her partnership with Ms. Godard. “But there’s always more to do.”
Ms. Godard concurred. “Faces and bodies are inexhaustible,” she said. “They are the richest landscapes and you can always find a new way to look at them.”
Stuart Staples, the frontman of the Tindersticks, said that his music and Ms. Denis’s films “have something deep in common, which is that there’s always a sense of space.”
Ms. Denis does occasionally bring on new collaborators, like Ms. Diop, a young filmmaker who had never acted before. Ms. Denis had been friendly with Ms. Diop’s uncle, the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety, who died in 1998. So Ms. Diop “was really already a part of the family,” Ms. Denis said.
She corrected herself a few seconds later. “Family is not the right word” for the group she has established around her work, she said. “I hate family pressures and family responsibilities. I’m more comfortable as a stranger. I always imagined I could just live in a hotel. I’m afraid of family.”
After a pause, she added, “Filmmaking creates a sort of — trust, maybe. It has led me to a group of people I feel good with. We have something in common because of film, when otherwise we might have nothing.”
Da Il Sole 24 Ore, 4 Settembre 2009