Sombre

Sombre (1998): If you insist on watching this movie, be sure to wear tight headgear or your head might explode while watching. I’ve had a run of decent French movies of late but definitely reached a new low with Sombre. The title means dark and this must refer to the subject matter as well as the quality of the lighting used in the film. This appears to be an art house movie about a serial killer and much of the movie takes place at night in very dark places. However, this is a French serial killer so no knives were damaged during the filming. I might have missed something, but it seemed to me that he massaged his victims to death.

I suspect the photographer was a crack head with withdrawal symptoms since many scenes were filmed with the unsteadiest steady-cam ever seen. He also seemed to be using the ‘focus optional’ route for film making as many shots were blurry and out of focus to give you that art house feel. My head almost exploded while watching one scene that starts out in a car looking out the side window as the scenery passes by. The scenery starts to go faster and faster, ‘focus optional’ cuts in, which slowly changes into meaningless electronic noise like patterns passing by, which then fade into another strange pattern which turns out to be the killer’s hair blowing in the wind as the camera pulls back. I’m sorry but I just didn’t get what the herpes that was supposed to mean. Another head throbber was the wacko killer always staring at the ceiling of his room or just staring up at the trees or the sky for much of the movie. One sky staring scene shows a jet’s contrail slowly cutting across the frame from upper right to lower left. Nice shot, but what the heck was it doing in this movie? The director probably was shooting when he saw the plane pass by, filmed it, and allowed it to become another potential involuntary cranial expansion causing scene for sensitive viewers. He also must have wanted to have another art house moment for his masterpiece.

The story goes something like this; a puppeteer doing children’s shows tends to have lots of sex with ladies of the night but it is usually fatal to the gals and the rather graphic episodes have lots of groping, messaging, moaning and rolling around if you like that sort of stuff. Enter two sisters, one blonde, rather loose in the moral department and the other dark, uptight and not adventurous. The uptight lassie has seen the puppeteer go off with a couple of ladies but the sisters still go off with Mr. Wacko and soon he almost kills the blonde but doesn’t due to intervention of the dark one. He offs another tute for good measure while traveling with the gals. Do the gals leave? Of course not; they wind up at a hotel with him. After an extra long threesome groping scene in his room, he ties up the blonde and Ms. Uptight goes to a bar with him. Now is this anything close to rational behavior? The uptight one ties one on with Jack Daniels and soon she and Mr. Wacko join two other guys and go to their house for a little of the old you know what. Soon more drinking and groping occurs. Mr. Wacko gets a bit annoying to the two carnal hopefuls and they proceed to bash Mr. Wacko to a pulpish consistency. Uptight escapes, frees her sister, puts her on a train and then goes back to Mr. Wacko! What? She finds him stumbling along the road, gets out of his car she stole and comforts him. Give me a break! They then have a lot of groping, messaging and rolling around in the dirt, rocks and twigs, when the normal expected end point is reached but he doesn’t kill her. He flags down a car, puts a somewhat loosened Ms. Uptight in it and tells her to go away. A long boring conversation between Ms. Uptight and the French woman driver occurs, Mr. Wacko falls down and appears to fall asleep in the dirt and the scene mercifully fades to black. But just as you hope to see the closing titles roar past, you get approximately 4 minutes of someone filming out of a car at a bunch of French people parked along a road apparently waiting for the Tour De France bicycle race to pass by. Having by now reached the limits of human endurance the closing titles finally start to roll and your head returns to normal size. This could possibly be the worst movie I’ve seen in years and if you are a regular reader, you know there is a lot of competition for that honor. Unfortunately, like so many French movies this one has no beginning, no ending, and an excruciating painfully long middle. The movie is not rated but should grope a hard R for: graphic nudity, massive massaging, massive groping, massive sky staring, excessive tree blowing, meaningless dialogue, missing dialogue, excessive shaky-cam, lack of focus, lack of plot, and lack of almost everything else needed to make a decent movie.