It’s tempting to label Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums “minor,” coming as it does on the heels of her previous film L’Intrus — arguably one of the most conceptually radical films of the decade, and perhaps the masterpiece of her remarkable career. Surely this new film, which stars Alex Dascas as a Parisian train operator sharing a tiny apartment with his university-aged daughter (Mati Diop) — a co-habitation that’s almost problematically intimate — is more conventional in its storytelling techniques. But, as shot by the peerless Agnes Godard, it’s no less beautiful. And the focus core of outsiders — with one exception, every major character is of African and Caribbean extraction — places it squarely within a filmography that’s always featured what might be called concentric communities of tightly-knit enclaves within a larger urban space. Her project is nothing less than the mapping of contemporary French society, and 35 Rhums is a precise, probing work of social cartography.

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