Sombre

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.

Not for all audiences, this movie would have pleased Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is bleak, disturbing, depressing, nasty, sad, gloomy, and most people won't like this one. Myself had some difficulties watching it entirely. I felt a bit sick, with a twisted taste in the mouth. But Marc Barbé is awesome, he is made for such roles. And in many movies, he is more or less like this one, a movie without many dialogues. And tha's even better, pictures speak for themselves. No useless bla bla bla.... It is rough, sad, I advise you not to show it to your parents in law nor your sweet heart. From time to time French movie industry can provide such features. A good thing for sure.

You have movies that are dark because of its style and tone and then there also are movies that are just dark due to a lack of light. And this movie decided so simply use no lights at all, even while the movie is mostly taking place during the nighttime, which causes most of the movie to be just too dark for its own good.

It would had been nice to see more of what was going on at times. I just really couldn't always tell what was happening and you might call it an artistic choice, or something along those lines but I call it cheap and ridicules. I mean it's a movie! You are supposed to be able to tell what is going on, by using your eyes.

This all really prevented me from ever getting into this movie. But besides all of that, I don't think that this movie would had intrigued me any better if it got shot with more light. The story is just too simplistic for that and it isn't really following a main plot to begin with.

Sure, I get it. This is supposed to be a movie that puts us into the mind of serial killer but it doesn't really ever do this in a very engaging way. The main character, besides being a killer, is also a rapist. This makes him even less sympathetic and even makes you more repulsed toward him and the entire movie in general, since there is a whole lot of hard, loveless, sex going on in this movie. Not that I ever was able to see much of it tough.

The movie just never got interesting for me and it failed to put me into the mind of a serial killer. There are numerous movies out there that did a far better job, with a similar sort of premise and setup. Movies like "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" or "Schramm" for example. Or even some cheap TV movies or television series episodes. In other words; it was not so much its concept but more its execution, that was wrong with this movie.

It's a movie that picks a more stylized approach to things and almost wants to be seen and taken as an artistic movie. But really, the movie just isn't being deep and engaging enough for that. It instead is a very distant movie, that doesn't delves into anything.

It's not a horrible movie, or one that I hated seeing (if I ever could see anything that is) but it just is one that fails at ever becoming interesting or engaging enough to watch.

5/10

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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.

Far from morality and any kind of convention, Sombre is a film that's all about seeing the world through the eyes of a killer. Sound and image on the hand of Grandrieux are combined into something that can only be described as a simulation of a panic attack.

The film is basically about a travelling puppeteer who kills women just before having sex them. Most of these women are prostitutes or strippers and it's natural that when he meets one whose concern is not to arouse him sexually, he finds himself unable to treat her the same. While that may seem contrived, Grandrieux is more concerned with the idea to travelling or moving than the actual story. The plot is there to follow all the changing locations and scenery and along with that the evolving emotions of the two main characters. It's actually real interesting to see that the film suggests that move is most likely the most natural human act, in the sense that being in motion is a type of struggle (interior or exterior) which is the only road to evolution and completion.