bakker@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Paultje Bakker) (02/06/91)
THE VANISHING
A film review by Paultje Bakker
Copyright 1991 Paultje Bakker
Have you ever gone to a public place, like a shopping centre, or a
pool, or a petrol station, and lost track of your friend/
sibling/wife/husband/child? Have they then inexplicably failed to show
up at a pre-arranged meeting place, leaving you to torture yourself with
horrible thoughts about what might have happened to them?
This is the topic of the newly released Dutch film, THE VANISHING.
This is no horror movie, and yet it can be very scary; it evokes that
mildly terrifying experience of loss and panic that most of us have had.
Although it's a Dutch movie, most of the dialogue is in French and
almost all of the action is set in France. It's about a young Dutch
couple who drive to France for their summer holiday, as young Dutch
couples tend to do. They stop at a petrol station, and red-headed
Saskia goes inside to buy a Coke and a Beer. She never returns. Her
husband (Rolf?) freaks out, but is unable to locate her and eventually
has to return to Holland. For three years he runs a desperate poster
campaign to locate her. Then, .... well, I don't want to spoil it for
you! Suffice to say that the plot takes a devious turn, and the movie
climaxes in one of the most surprising and emotional endings I have
ever seen.
And most distressing of all, it's 100% believable. SEE THIS MOVIE!
and if anyone tries to tell you the ending, KILL THEM!
It's currently showing in Brisbane; I don't know about any other
cities.
--
paultje
bakker@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au
--Paul Bakker email: bakker@batserver.cs.uq.oz.aufrankm@microsoft.UUCP (Frank MALONEY) (05/31/91)
THE VANISHING
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
THE VANISHING is a Franco-Dutch film directed by George Sluizer,
adapted by Tim Krapp'e from his own novel, and starring Gene Bervoets
(Rex), Johanna Ter Steegel (Saskia), and Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu
(Raymond).
THE VANISHING is a thriller in which a woman suddenly,
inexplicably, and unaccountably disappears. That much is rather
familiar territory, at least since Hitchcock's wonderful THE LADY
VANISHES began delighting and frightening us 55 years ago or so. The
questions of how did it happen, why, and by whose agency are pretty much
the standard ones is this particular subgenre. Here Sluizer efficiently
disposes of these in reverse order starting early on into the film. We
get to see the events leading up to the vanishing first as they relate
to the young Dutch couple on holiday in the South of France and then we
begin again with the bad guy and the long road to leads ultimately to
the vanishing.
Predestination is a theme here. Dreams, signs, and defying fate
are the engine that moves all the major characters.
After a fight, Rex promises Saskia never to abandon her again.
After Saskia vanishes at a French service station, Rex becomes obsessed
with finding out what happened to her. If there is horror in this
movie, it is the arbitrariness and accidental nature of life. The bad
guy, Raymond, wants to find out how bad he really is; incredibly Raymond
is something of klutz, an awkward, unconvincing, subtly alarming stalker
of women and it takes a long time and lots of practice and failures
before providence or shall we call it accidence gives him the victim he
wants.
In the end, Sluizer leaves only the question of how to the end. I
would rather he had not. The penultimate scene would have been better
left on the cutting room floor. The film does not really answer the
question of why because it ultimately posits an arbitrary world in which
motivation is irrelevant. Therefore, how becomes mere tidiness.
Without that the how being tidied, we would have been left with a
delicious, savory mystery, rather as we were in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
Still, the performances are uniformly fine, if not especially
showy. The character of Raymond is the most interesting and subtly
acted; but then the devil always gets the best lines. This particular
devil is rather funny at times with his clumsiness and endless
scribbling of notations and timings. Sinister, of course, but also a
smug bourgeois lecturer and family man. A man driven by mechanism you
and I can barely fathom, but also a man who spills on himself.
I enjoyed THE VANISHING despite the weak ending and can recommend
it to anyone who isn't put off by subtitles, subtlety, no music telling
us when we're scared, or low budgets.
--
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney