35 Shots of Rum

(Cert 12A)
Film still from 35 Shots Of Rum (35 Rhums)
Film still from 35 Shots Of Rum (35 Rhums) Photograph: PR

Claire Denis was raised in francophone Africa and most of her films are set there or involve people from the former colonies living in France. The best of them is the excellent Beau Travail, a loose transposition of Melville's Billy Budd to a Foreign Legion barracks in Djibouti. Her fine new film centres on a group of friends, all of African descent and living in a Paris suburb.

The central figures are the widowed engine-driver Lionel, who shares a flat with his pretty student daughter, Jo, in the same block as the handsome taxi-driver Gabrielle, and the good-looking businessman Noé, who inhabits the penthouse apartment left him by his parents. Gabrielle is carrying a torch for Lionel; Noé, who is always on the point of leaving, fancies Jo, who herself feels a need to break away, while Lionel leads a satisfying life on lines as confidently set as those he drives upon. An older colleague of Lionel's is suicidally lost when he retires from the railway. Lionel visits his elderly white mother-in-law in Germany, taking Jo with him. Otherwise nothing very dramatic happens. Yet we are constantly held by this quiet, subtle, elliptical film that observes its characters' moods and their shifting relationships with the same uncloying love and concern the characters show towards each other. The film's title refers to a symbolic drinking ritual between the railwaymen.