ARGUABLY THE BEST FILM OF FRENCH WRITER-DIRECTOR CLAIRE Denis's brilliant if underappreciated career — and absolutely the best new movie to open in D.C. in 2009 — 35 Shots of Rum is impeccably contemporary. It treats "family" as something not limited by genetic bond, and depicts a Paris where the large number of African-rooted people is taken for granted. Yet Denis's film is also a subtle homage to a director who died almost 50 years ago, and her reply to a question that has always haunted cinema: How should movies tell stories?

We know Hollywood's answer, of course. The "dream factory" believes that stories should be unambiguous, familiar, and pre-sold: The formula is to take a book (or a comic, TV show, or videogame) and simply act it out — like a grade-school pageant, but with big stars and flashy effects to distract from the numbing predictability of the material. Denis disagrees, eloquently. Rendered with a calligrapher's brush rather than a sledgehammer, 35 Shots of Rum is a elegant sketch whose simple lines conjure a far richer world than the images fabricated by battalions of CGI compositors. The film is as notable for what it omits and what it includes, and is laced with subtle but delightful formal surprises.

There's actually plenty of narrative in Denis's exquisite and elliptical snapshot of life in (and near) Paris's immigrant-heavy 18th arrondissement, but you have to pay attention. The event that occasions RER train-driver Lionel (Alex Descas) to down the titular 35 rums is never shown, and the tale's backstory is suggested only with quick strokes. Yet the film's indirect style, which mirrors Lionel's own reticence, is lovely, delicate, and ultimately moving. (The movie is also, in its dry manner, quite funny.)

Lionel is, essentially, the patriarch of a non-traditional household split across three apartments in one building. His daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), a college anthropology student and part-time music-store clerk, lives with him. Down the hall is Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), a taxi driver who's apparently Lionel's ex; she clearly wants to take back the role of Lionel's lover and Joséphine's stepmother. (We eventually learn something about Jo's biological mother, but not much.) Upstairs is restless Noé (Grégoire Colin), living in his late parents's apartment with their elderly cat; he might be Joséphine's boyfriend, if he can stick around. That most of these people are of African descent is notable, but not noted; Denis, who grew up in Cameroon, wants us to see African Paris as something established and everyday, just the way her characters live it.

Beginning a rare excursion with the other three, Gabrielle remarks that's great to have such a "family" outing. The moment is poignant, since neither Lionel nor Joséphine are as close to the cabbie as she'd like. But the comment also underscores the many ways in which 35 Rums — the movie's French title — is about kin. In addition to the four main characters, Denis introduces Ren´ (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a member of Lionel's work family. After retiring, Ren´ becomes directionless. His startling solution to his malaise shocks Lionel (and perhaps Joséphine) into the realization that their lives can't continue on the same track.

The film's story, turned into a script by Denis and frequent collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau, was inspired by the life of the director's mother and grandfather. A Brazilian who came to Paris to study, Denis's grandfather married a Frenchwoman who died when their daughter was a baby. And so father and child became exceptionally close, just like Lionel and Joséphine. Indeed, the two characters are so intimate that at first it seems they might be a middle-aged man and his much younger lover. But then, 10 minutes into the film, Joséphine says, "Thank you, Daddy."

She thanks him because he's finally remembered to buy a Japanese-style rice-cooker, which he brings home after a day riding the rails from suburb to suburb and back. (It's a lonely job that seems to suit Lionel as well as it does the movie's structure.) But he must have been promising to get the cooker for some time, because Joséphine already bought one in the previous scene, in which she's framed through a window — a typical 35 Rums composition — but also by array of identical rice-cookers.

That Lionel and Joséphine's apartment suddenly has two electric ricepots is a witty harbinger of the story's resolution. (At what event do people find themselves with multiples of the same appliance?) But the cooker also offers another hint: 35 Rums is Denis's tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, the world's greatest director of what the Japanese call the "home drama." Paris in 2008 is very different from Tokyo in 1940s and '50s, but 35 Rums offers a recognizable version of the exemplary Ozu plot: a single father recognizes that it's time for his daughter to marry, even though it means he will be alone. (That's the essence of 1962's An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's final film, and the first one Denis ever saw.)

Ozu, who never married or had children, upheld the Japanese notion of family, in which bloodlines are essential. Denis's idea of kinship is more flexible, and includes her own cast and crew: Descas and Colin are regular collaborators, as are Fargeau and the Tindersticks, the British cabaret-rock ensemble that provided the movie's very French score. (Descas also appeared this year in Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, starring Isaach de Bankol´, who starred in Denis's 1988 debut, Chocolat; Jarmusch employed Denis as his assistant director on 1986's Down by Law.) Diop, a filmmaker with no acting experience, is new to Denis's company, but the young woman's uncle, the late Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety, was among Denis's friends.

Beautifully photographed and composed by Agnès Godard, another longtime Denis associate, 35 Rums includes sequences of pure imagery, train footage that reminds us of the natal link between railroads and cinema. (The Lumiere brothers brought down the house with Train Arriving at a Station in 1895, and where would movies go without tracking shots?) Trains are also a constant in Ozu's films; no wonder that one of the main characters in Cafe Luimière, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Ozu tribute, is working on a conceptual-art project involving Tokyo's immense rail system.

35 Rums, which had its local debut last spring at Filmfest DC, isn't just trenchant allusions and formal pleasures. Its style of storytelling may be hushed and oblique, but Denis can convey a lot without words. Joséphine's and Noé's relationship is fully represented in just a few scenes, including an enchanted one where the guy cuts in on a father-daughter dance, as well as an angry one in which Joséphine attacks her apartment with a vacuum cleaner after Noé casually mentions a plan for his future that doesn't include her. The rice-cooker insinuates that Noé won't actually take a job in Gabon, but nothing is guaranteed. In its quiet way, 35 Shots of Rum is a thrill-a-minute experience.

35 SHOTS OF RUM— 2008, 96 min; at Landmark E Street.