Sombre (1998) Fransk mordfilm

Jean is a woman slayer. He goes around France with his dolls and his wolf costume, as his only baggage. A street hooker, two call girls and a woman he meets at a bar, become the subjects of long and painful torture before they die. He leaves the bodies in rundown hotel room, where he performs his deeds. He meets Claire, who seems headed for the same destiny as the earlier women that Jean has met, but instead they start liking each other. Perhaps Claire can identify with Jean, with his loneliness and his brutality. Philippe Grandrieux has his own vision of filmmaking. ''Don't follow the screenplay, don't make the film, liberate the film'', he writes in his production notes, and Sombre does seem to live its own life. I n order to depict the inner world of Jean, Grandrieux has put aside realism. The film has its own film language with handheld camera, dark lighting, loose chronology, inconsistency of place and where stylished images. The grand landscape where the film takes place, with heavy skies, often at the break of dawn, enhance the mysteriousness of the characters and their love for each other. Jean acts in a clumsy way and has big problems communicating with his surroundings. With his painful childhood memories, he lives alone in the periphery of society. Claire is a virgin and she feels that she has missed the life she would want to live. Even though Jean is so locked into himself, she can see beyond the walls that he has created. She identifies with him and he can offer her the life she misses. Their love is doomed from the beginning, but it will resonate within them, for a long time to come.