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Sombre * Philippe Grandrieux (1998)

This film has been on my wishlist for a while, but I did not know (or realise) that it is of the same director as “La Vie Nouvelle”. Knowing that, I can say that the films are quite similar. Dark, shaky handheld filming, underlighted and out-of-focus images, sex and violence. Yep, also “Sombre” is a dark, filmographic experience, my kind of film. It might not be brilliant, but there are not a whole lot of such films available (perhaps for the better too), so it is alway nice to run into one. We follow Jean, a puppeteer (the film opens with an extremely dark Lynchian scene with children watching his show) who follows the route of the Tour de France during which he picks up hitchhikers, but more often prostitutes, to live out his weird sexual preferences. The women usually end up dead. Then Jean meets the sisters Claire (an introvert virgin) and Christine (quite the opposite) and for a while Jean’s good side seems to take over. A roadtrip starts that can only end in one way, or not?

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