Sombre (1998)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This was recommended to me as a similar thing to Austrian serial killer film Angst, as subversive horror constructed by the serial eye. Horror that is the unmediated present moment with none of the fictions around it that we use to justify watching.Now Angst operated a two-fold camera: up close to violence and far away from it as possible, allowing human madness within the framework of an abstract world. It was a powerful exercise for this reason: this second camera was pivotally ours. How did we handle this view away from violence? Did it provide relief or was it merely a distraction that got in the way of our enjoyment? This goes the extra mile. It eliminates the latter type of camera, the bird's eye view, that is in essence the spiritual eye that can see far and wide and encompass the world, in doing so eliminates clarity, coherence, sense, centeredness, and solely invests itself in the internal camera intimately capturing motions and landscapes of deranged soul. The effect is uncanny: a patchwork of frantic, jittery, blurred, incomplete, half-visible glimpses of a mind struggling no longer to make sense - as we did in Angst - but to simply exist inside the world it frames and transforms images from.Naturally the film is French, and can be traced all the way back to the kaleidoscopic motions of L'Herbier and Epstein, back to the 20's when film was still something you engineered for the eye. Photogenie, as Epstein was fond of calling the effect, a world in flux.The film would be worth watching for just this, justified for just the roaming vision. But we have another effect on top of this, more explicitly self-referential about what it means to want to see. Our man is a puppeteer, the opening scene is presumably one of his shows, coated in darkness, before an audience of screaming children. Then he goes on his raping spree, attracted to sex that invites a prying gaze - one is a stripper, as far as I could make out. The whole is threaded around the Tour of France, a big cycling event that lasts for three weeks. He orbits for some time around people wanting to see, in a sense lusting for spectacle.We don't though, we don't see. For the most part the film unfolds across twilight hour, our sight cramped by the night. We keep watching though. Worse yet, we keep trying to make out the show's sordid details.Two soliloquies bookend the claustrophobic tunnel vision, both of them memories. One layers the film as sudden, frightful pain from childhood. The other as another random turn in the random turns of a meaningless world where lovers impulsively check into a hotel in Paris, visiting the city of lights for the first time, and eleven days later the man is simply dead.

For me, this is a very powerful movie. I feel like I was not seeing a movie, but seeing something greater, stronger, and more powerful than "movie". I like every scene in this film. I feel I couldn't breathe when I saw it. It really fascinated and captivated me from the beginning until the end. The acting is also very good. Some actors in this film give the feeling like they were not acting, but "being" their characters. Elina Lowensohn is very great. Her eyes speak much louder and clearer than her words. The lighting, the movement of the camera, the raw feelings expressed from this movie made me feel as if I was not in a cinema, but in the story with all these characters. Hardly a movie can touch or move me this strongly! The joke about the stranded one is a good comment on human nature. The road scenes are hauntingly beautiful. Personally, I think every scene in this movie is indeed "emotionally" beautiful.

I saw this film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The response to this film was divided. Some people applauded, others left the theater before the movie ended. It definitely was a film that hit me. The roughness of the cuts, sounds and lighting, in combination with very few dialogues and conversations, brings about an eerie atmosphere. This is not exactly the peaceful and jolly French countryside as shown in the average travel magazine one would take a glance at! Grandieux makes it look like a hideous, dark place, which (to my mind) suggest the acts of the main character are in some way influenced by that atmosphere. The strongest point of this movie, is the absence of any moral content. ´Why´ is not a question that Grandieux has tried to bring across to the viewers. It is precisely this lack of moral content that frightens some spectators. I can imagine that. However, they cannot deny that it is a very original film. In spite of the fact that the ´serial murderer theme´ can be found in many movies, the approach to this theme is completely different in this film. This is definitely a film which I will remember! I think people will either love it or hate it -I suppose the majority of people will be ´haters´-, actually I am surprised it made some Dutch cinemas. I recommend this film to anyone who likes original, non conventional movies. Give it a try. If you hate it: a VCR has an eject button.

Tonight 'Sombre' premiered in the Netherlands. Present in the audience was the director of Sombre, mr. Philippe Grandrieux. He is known mostly as a maker of documentaries and videos, and it shows in Sombre, his first movie. Shaking camera's (he told the audience he shot most of the footage with a 35mm camera (about 24 kilo's heavy, that's gotta hurt at the end of the day), extreme close-ups and experiments with dark and light. It absolutely complements the story.About the story. It tells the story of Jean (Marc Barbé), a man that has many sexual encounters with women, but ends up killing them. Why, we do not know. I think he tries to love women, but at the end his lust takes over and controls him. After a couple encounters he meets a woman played by Elina Lowensohn. Apparantly she's something else. She also has a history she's not completely happy with (why we don't know) and she joins Jean with her sister. It doesn't take long before Jean tries to rape and kill the sisters. They escape. But apparently she is somehow touched by Jean, a touch she can't forget (a romantic vision about love, says Grandrieux). She goes back to him. They have sex but at the end Jean drives her away. He can't be with her, because for the first (in the movie) time he experiences love, but he still can't control his lust and she can't be with him because she might end up being dead. Oh bitter irony...The movie ends with spectators of the Tour de France, a metaphor for reality watching this morbid fairy tale. And it is a bit of a fairy tale. Jean is a puppet player. He does a show in front of crowd of children (one of the best scenes in the film). He plays the wolf, the Beast! Eline plays the Beauty ( at the end of the film, I have my doubts about that, but anyway...).It's a difficult movie! Grandrieux tells us that one of his main influences is the silent movie. Silent movies have spots on the film, the cuts are clearly visible, it's rough, 'it stays in the ears, even when you can't hear the sound'. And Sombre is rough and dirty. In some scenes you can almost touch objects, for example hair or a woman's thy. Other scenes are very serene and still, but you still feel the objects. Grandrieux tells us that he want to make the audience edit the movie realtime. And that was exactly what I did. You need some imagination with this picture, you have to fill in the blanks, because not much information and dialogue is given to you. What Grandriex achieves with this, is a connection between the audience and the film. 'Edit the movie the same time you are watching it'. Man, you gotta love that one.Still, I would liked to have some more info on the characters and their history. I liked to know what makes them do the things they do. Now they are just doing them. And with almost no moral in it. There are some scenes where the theme hope is explored, but you got to dig deep. That results in dividing the audience in two teams. You either like it or you hate it. One more thing, the music. The music by Alan Vega is excellent.See this movie, make your own story of it and make your own conclusions. Sombre is good material for the eyes and ears and the mind. Phillipe Grandrieux is a kind man who tought that the only way he could express his feelings with this theme, was by film. I rate it 7 out of 10.