Review of Sombre (1998) by Ryan H — 23 Sep 2011

I can't really say I enjoyed watching Sombre, but I can say it made me think and was really interesting. I think what made the film painful (other than the subject of murder and sex mixing together) was how everything was underexposed and shaky. There were plenty of things that Grandrieux did to make sure his audience didn't have a joyful experience. Although, Peter Bowlin did have a chub through half the film. The film opens up with kids watching a movie and rooting for someone to get killed (if I'm not mistaken, I believe that's what was happening). Then we move into the main character, Jean, who is in a room with a prostitute, making her show off her body and him getting her scent, and then killing her. We go through this twice before he meets Claire, the woman he falls in love with. The next part of the film shows him together with her for a bit while he takes her to her sister's for holiday. During this holiday he is ready to kill two strippers, but he can't because he sees Claire. He has fallen in love and wants to be a better person. Up to this point there really hasn't been much dialogue. Perhaps we have had 20 lines tops and it's about an hour into the film. Every single word sticks to the audience and makes them use what they were given to put the pieces together. In this way, it's very well done. Then when he sees Claire's sister naked for the second time he can't help himself and has to do what he normally does to naked women: smell their cooch and then suffocate them.

**SPOILERS**.

The party scene is pretty tough. They go back and two guys try to have sex with Claire, but she is a virgin. Something sparks within Jean and he wants to stop them. Instead he gets the shit kicked out of him and she drives away. She saves her sister and is driving back to Paris, but on the way back she finds Jean. Instead of her getting mad and killing Jean with the car, she stops, gets out, and has sex with him. But interesting enough, she takes control and shows him it's her decision. See, in the past, Jean paid women to have sex. He was in complete control and he kills them. Just like how he's a puppeteer, being in control is what gets him off. So when she takes control it's simply sex and no killing. But he doesn't know if he can stop himself again, so he stops a car and makes her leave him. In the end, he is back to his routine. So the film is questioning this: is killing in his nature, just like our hormones for sex? Love is natural for her, she can't help it, so can he help himself from killing these women? Or at least, this is how I saw the film. There is another scene where Claire is talking to the woman that picked her up and she claims Jean was her husband. The woman asks Claire if she loves him and she says yes. Then the woman goes on to explain that she fell in love when she was 15 when she didn't really know what love was. It's not always something you can understand, but something inside of you. This film gives you plenty to think over and play with, but some of it was a little too painful to watch. Perhaps this was the filmmaker's intentions, but it wasn't always needed.