Four days into the Venice Film Festival, and the programme feels as though it has been temporarily hijacked by hubris and bombast. With a spectacularly inept thriller (Barbet Schroeder’s Inju, La Bete Dans L’Ombre) and an incoherently hallucinatory gangster movie (the unwatchable Plastic City by Lu Lik-wai) on offer, the audience is more than ready for something intimate and meaningful, a film that doesn’t play like an assault with a blunt weapon. Claire Denis’ exquisitely understated 35 Shots of Rum couldn’t have come at a better time. There’s a palate-cleansing truth and compassion to the movie, which feels like a cool hand on a fevered brow – the memories of the raging awfulness of some of the festival’s high-profile dogs has been gently blurred by the warmth and humanity of Denis’ film.

Essentially a film about love and family, 35 Shots of Rum is a slow-burning pleasure that leaves you wondering for the first 30 minutes or so just what exactly is the point of all the comfortable mundanity that unfolds like a well-worn blanket. Widower Lionel (Alex Descas) has watched his daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop) grow into a beautiful, intelligent and loyal young woman. There’s a flicker of incredulous pride in the smile he flashes at her across the dinner she prepares for him every night. There’s a wordless self-sufficiency in their relationship; a tacit interdependency that feels more like the easy companionship of an old married couple than a father and daughter bond.

They are not alone – a de facto family unit has grown with Lionel and Jo at its heart. Their neighbour Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), a taxi driver with a hopeful 100-watt smile, yearns to be a mother to Jo and a wife to Lionel. And upstairs in their apartment block lives Noé (regular Denis collaborator Grégoire Colin), who adores Joséphine so much that he will hurl himself into icy water just to maker her smile. The film explores a kind of rite of passage – father and daughter have to accept that the time has come for Jo to live her own life; but neither is quite ready to relinquish their own special love.

In this film, which is as much about what is not said and not shown as what is, the quality of the acting is pivotal. And Denis could not have asked for more eloquent performances from her four leads. The heart of the film comes in a series of scenes set over the course of one evening – all four are driving to a concert in Gabrielle’s taxi when it breaks down. Although nothing is spoken, the hopes and doubts, the yearning and the crushing disappointments of this group of people are expressively explored in one of the finest pieces of ensemble acting I have seen in a long time.

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