who got married at the end - 35 rhums (2009) Discussion

[–] jfrie29924 14 years ago

I felt Lionel was retiring and his opportunity to have his 35 shots of rum, since the occasion only happens once.

I also assumed from the next scene that Jo is moving out, thus the rice cooker

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[–] LudwA 14 years ago

yeah i thought he was retiring too.

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[–] DogtownGirl 14 years ago

Wait, why would Lionel retiring mean that his daughter would have to move out?

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[–] spikyfish 14 years ago

I thought it was definitely Jo getting married to the guy upstairs.

She asked him to marry him after her and her dad had the row in the flat.....she's cleaning like a mad woman and is upset because the guy upstairs is moving out and this will wreck the "family unit" in their block of flats....her and her dad have a bit of a row..... she goes up stairs and bangs on the guys' door...he eventually opens it and says something like "have you got something you want to ask me/tell me"....she then looks all mysterious at him.

It was definitely her getting married as she was wearing white, her dad gave her the necklace that belonged to her mother, Gabriel was knocking on the door wanting to do her hair and she had one of those wedding flower arrangements in her button hole.

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[–] journeybear 14 years ago

Who knows? It isn't shown. We have to guess, just as we have to guess what drinking 35 shots of rum means, and what the significance of the rice cooker is, and on and on. So little happens in this movie, and the little that does happen is unclear, that viewers are left in limbo and must guess what happened. This is the worst kind of storytelling - it's hardly storytelling at all - and this is the worst movie I have seen not only this year, but in years.

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[–] Revolutionow 14 years ago

Yes, I much prefer the type of movie where everything is explained to me in long dialogue sequences. That way I can leave my brain at home and just drool all over myself in the theatre while the director/writer clubs me over the head with their "message".

All I can think about are dudes.

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[–] darkkie 14 years ago

@Revolutionow: I totally agree. They should have added some flashbacks also, that way we could been 100% sure of what has happened.

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[–] Revolutionow 14 years ago

I was thinking a voice-over would be good, then at the end they could have text that explains what happened to the characters over the rest of their lives.

All I can think about are dudes.

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[–] 14 years ago

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[–] JohnDaz 13 years ago

rofl!! :D

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[–] Revolutionow 13 years ago

=P

ce n'est pas une image juste, c'est juste une image

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[–] klaus_rieser 12 years ago

Yes, and please multiple explanations. As it is we only SEE Josephine's reluctance towards Noé. Wouldn't it be much better if only she would also say as much to him (like: "I don't know, I think I can't leave my father") and then confine in a girlfriend (like "I don't know, Noé might not be the right guy, there's that black dude"). And then have somebody else remark on their relationship, just so we are sure to get it.

While we are at it, how about adding some action scenes, that should increase the appeal to the "average" adolescent male.

And how about a laugh track, since the movie is so gloomy?

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[–] Robanjo78 13 years ago

The marriage:
After Jo had the argument with her dad, Lionel, she finally steps up to her fellings towards her neighbour and her fathers wish for her to leave and start her own life, and go and knock on her neighbours door. He opens the door and ask if she has anything she wants to say. Maybe he asked her to marry earlier without her giving a clear answer and after the cafe scene were she avoids kissing him in front of her dad, he gets tired of it all and tells her and Danielle the next morning(where the cat is dead) that he plans to sell the apartment and move abroad.
That, combined with her argument with Lionel, makes her step up and goes and tell the neighbour that she is ready and wants to marry him. Which they do.

The Rum Game:
Obviously, Lionel and his collegues have some sort of tradition going concerning drinking 35 shots of rum. Wether it is something everybody does once a while or only once, we dont know. Maybe its a standing challenge. But Lionel has obviously been asked several times if it's his turn to drink the 35 shots. He has postponed it everytime, saying, he will do it when the time is right. In his case, the time was right, when his daughter, Jo, finally got married, moved out of they home, and started a life of her own. That was very important to him. He didnt want Jo to spend her younger years taking care of her dad. Its not that Lionel couldnt take care of himself, but Jo could feel his loneliness after her mothers dead and didnt have the heart to move, even though he begged her.

The Rice Cooker:
In the very last scene, we see that Lionel has bought a new Rise Cooker, since Jo is moving out taking the red Rise Cooker with her. That scene was purely there to tell us that Jo finally moved out.

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It is unbelievable that people dont have the patience to enjoy a movie gem like this. Someone cried about the need for flashbacks because otherwise he wouldnt know what was going on. Other cry for lack of plot, whatever that means.

This movie has everything that is needed to understand and enjoy it.

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[–] pault-brooks 14 years ago

I can safely assume that Jo marries Noe. Subsequently, Lionel drinks the thirty-five shots of rum in celebration (of his daughter's marriage) and in sadness (for he will be alone). The item he unboxes and places on the counter at the end of the film is a slow cooker, not a rice cooker, and it signifies that he will be preparing his evening meals before he leaves for work because his daughter will no longer be around to prepare them and have them ready for him when he arrives home.

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[–] kirkmusic 14 years ago

Thank God for this website and for all of you. I had got it into my head that the event at the ending was Rene's funeral. But this makes a lot more sense.

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[–] ppllkk 14 years ago

The item he unboxes and places on the counter at the end of the film is a slow cooker, not a rice cooker...

The cooker in question is definitely a rice cooker. It has a light, aluminum, removable pot which rests on a spring-loaded thermostat, and you can see the empty pot jiggle around on the thermostat. This is how all but the most expensive rice cookers work. Slow cookers have heavy, usually ceramic, pots, and the pots do not bounce around on a spring-loaded thermostat when empty because there isn't a thermostat.

Through the miracle of the DVD player, it can be determined that it is the same rice cooker that Jo bought at the beginning of the film.

It would have been quite a nice touch, however, had it been a slow cooker.

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[–] mackjay2 13 years ago

I think you're right, she marries Noe. They are celebrating at the end, Gabrielle is crying, they drink 35 Rhums, etc.
As for the rice cooker: if you recall, both Jo and Lionel bought cookers at the beginning, without knowing. I think Jo assumed he would forget to buy one, so she bought hers, but she did not show it to him so he'd feel good about the situation. At the end of the film, he finds the one she bought, and realizes the small thing that had happened between them without saying anything. Denis makes small observations about people's lives, and her films function in terms of these things, they are what make up most of our lives, along with the relationships and routines.

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[–] e_tucker 14 years ago

The marriage is an ellipsis just like in Ozu's Late Spring, from which this film draws considerably. The other pot is also a rice cooker, though a redundant one. It's significance is that a young woman would chose to buy something with the income from her job that contributes to the domesticity of her life with her father rather than something just for herself, as though she has settled into that life. The last scene parallels the final scene in Ozu's film, where the father sits alone peeling an apple, just as the scene where the daughter is pulling at her hair and clearly very upset in the bathroom parallels the scene where Setsuko Hara is seen crying alone in her room before her wedding.

There are many other intersections between the two films of course. Denis does an outstanding job of capturing the quiet elegance of the theme and elements of the original, while bringing something particular of her own to it.

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[–] AtoZ2014 10 years ago

This thread was helpful. I basically liked the movie but I first borrowed it from the library, but couldn't get it to play the last 20 minutes without big gaps so I netflixed it to see the last 20 minutes. Quiet and sad but quite lovely movie.

Another movie that is roughly comparable, i.e., beautifully filmed but a plot that is a bit hard to follow, is Upstream Color. The critics loved that one. I did to.

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[–] 10 years ago

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