A young Dutch couple Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege)
are on holiday in France. They drive a small car with twin bicycles mounted
upright on the roof rack, like a pair of riderless horses, one over each of
their heads. They wear unusually light colours, and Saskia, a playful,
energetic strawberry blonde, radiates effervescent lightness—at one point she
performs a Chaplinesque pratfall. Yet shadows loom. The couple traverses a
long, dark tunnel, something out of a nightmare, and Saskia relays to Rex a
recurring nightmare in which she finds herself trapped inside a golden egg.
Then the car runs out of petrol—Rex’s fault—and Rex abandons Saskia to fetch a
jerry can from the service station they already passed. They eventually
continue on their way, but we are by now watching this immensely unnerving
movie with a heightened alertness. We sense that everything, every glance or
gesture or bit of happenstance, could be charged with portent. And we would be
correct. We watch and wait for something or someone to vanish.
The Vanishing (1988), the first, Franco-Dutch version of two version
directed by the late George Sluzier, is newly available from Criterion and,
while not a horror movie per se, is easily one of the creepiest things you
could take in this Halloween. Based on Tim Krabbé’s novel The Golden Egg, it’s at once pulpy and profound, archetypical and
innovative, employing an age-old anxiogetic scenario—a lover vanishes without a
trace—in the service of a narrative that defies conventional strategies. Rather
than build suspense regarding the perpetrator of Saskia’s kidnapping, we’re
introduced to her kidnapper early on, before the kidnapping even occurs. Rather
than ramp up tension in a compressed timeframe, we leap ahead several years in
the middle of the film. The resolution, too, works counter to genre dictates,
though I’d hate to spoil that here for those of you who haven’t seen this Vanishing.
One could even argue
that the protagonist of The Vanishing is
in fact not Rex but, rather, Raymond Lermorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), the
middle-class family man and self-confessed sociopath responsible for vanishing
Saskia. We see him make pivotal decisions and we learn a lot about his
motivations, background and philosophies. He’s a nefarious figure, but also a
seeker, animated by great questions: a man on a quest. In a bit of wordplay
that, admittedly, probably only makes sense in English, Raymond attempts to
entrap his victim by seeking assistance with a small trailer hitch. The word
“hitch” gets repeated, and, likewise, Alfred Hitchcock is never far from the
viewer’s mind. The Vanishing seems to
have absorbed and brilliantly reconfigured elements of several Hitchcock films:
The Lady Vanishes (1938), Psycho (1960), Strangers on a Train (1950), whose Bruno Anthony could be Raymond’s
uncle.
But Raymond is not
necessarily the most troubling character in The
Vanishing, whose French title, it should be noted, is L’Homme qui voulait
savoir or The Man Who
Wanted to Know. Rex is just as
obsessive a seeker as Raymond, but Rex’s is more single-minded: years after her
disappearance, even after he’s gotten himself a new girlfriend, Rex must, at
any cost, find out what happened to Saskia. This intolerance of ambiguity, or “eternal
uncertainty,” as Raymond puts it, something of nearly theological force, is The Vanishing’s most psychologically fascinating
and finally tragic element. And it’s one of the things that makes this film an enduringly
eerie classic.
