Sombre (1998)

A sexually frustrated serial killer takes a liking to a woman he comes across.

Director:

Philippe Grandrieux

Writers:

Sophie Fillières, Philippe Grandrieux

Stars:

Marc Barbé, Elina Löwensohn, Géraldine Voillat

1 win & 1 nomination.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Marc Barbé	...	Jean
Elina Löwensohn	...	Claire
Géraldine Voillat	...	Christine
Coralie	...	La première femme
Maxime Mazzolini	...	L'enfant aux yeux bandés
Alexandra Noël	...	La seconde femme
Annick Lemonnier	...	La troisième femme
Sadija Sada Sarcevic	...	La mère de Claire
Lea Civello	...	Fille de la boîte de nuit 1
Astrid Combes	...	Fille de la boîte de nuit 2
Sylvie Granato	...	La quatrième femme
Tony Baillargeat	...	Homme du bal 2
Marc Berman	...	Homme du bal 1
Martine Vandeville	...	La femme du HLM
Antoine Debilly	...	L'enfant du HLM

Storyline

A car, following the Tour de France. Children screaming in front of the puppet show. Women, often prostitutes, trying to scream as they are being strangled. Then he will meet Claire, the virgin who will give herself to him, and perhaps deliver him from his malediction.

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Plot Keywords:

children | puppet show | tour de france | virgin | prostitute | 

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Genres:

Drama | Horror

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Details

Country:

France

Language:

French

Release Date:

27 January 1999 (France)

Also Known As:

Dunkle Triebe

Company Credits

Production Co:

Arte France, Canal+, Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

112 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby SR

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Trivia

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.

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Soundtracks

Bela Lugosi's Dead
Written by Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins (as Kevin Dompe), Peter Murphy and David J (as David J. Haskins)
Performed by Bauhaus
Courtesy of Bauhaus Music

User Reviews

An eye for sordid darkness

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.