dbdumonteil
This is the kind of movie which shows the paucity of French cinema when it comes to making thrillers.The director's desire to "sound American" is so glaring that you will not be fooled a minute,unless you have not seen a serial killer movie since "Peeping Tom".Two male cops (or one and a half,more like,as you will see),horrible murders,a plot more complicated than complex.Charles Berling is not lucky with the genre(see the astoundlingly dumb "l'inconnu de Strasbourg" a couple of years ago).The scenes with his pregnant wife -which are supposed to be a counterpart for the otherwise noir atmosphere of the rest of the plot-are among the worst ever filmed.Add a steamy love scene between them and a gory autopsy to get a PG 12 and thus to attract the huge adolescent audience.A violent and absurd conclusion,followed by a silent epilogue who could make a nice commercial for the côte d'azur,it's really the silence of the lame.
nakkas
In contrast to the other reviews I found "Scènes de crimes" neither to be a French Silence of the Lambs (not pretentious enough, which can't be said of "Les rivières pourpres"), nor does it portray the policiers as fools or less sophisticated. Instead, it showed a far more realistic depiction of police work and the police officers: most threads eventually lead to a cul-de-sac, and the cops are mere mortals. They're not driven by an existentialist need to fight evil etc. to define themselves. They are simply doing their job as good as they can. As to the ending: part of me thinks it's a cop-out, too. But on the other hand, maybe the finale simply tried to state that despite the depravity and indifference around us sometimes fate gives us a second chance. Even though it was only a short scene, the angry priest at the funeral stuck out. His sermon/rant about charity and respect strongly contrasted with the pervading moral numbness and sense of isolation. All in all a subtle, yet troubling thriller; and far better than "Les rivières pourpres" exactly because it DIDN'T try to be something it wasn't.
Alice Liddel
'Scenes de crimes' purports to depict a dark, disturbing malaise that seems to infect the very geography of France; less the vile outrages of a lone serial killer than a moral sickness spreading over the nation, a numbing disease that reduces the young, the future, to disassembled body parts. There is a touch of reactionary sentiment perhaps here, as the victims are all drug-takers, hitchhikers, sexually promiscuous, teenage pregnancies, punished for their transgression; but so are their parents for their lack of control. This is a film that is obsessed with families - it opens and closes with images of family, a teenager who refuses to go on holidays with her parents, and is later brutally tortured and murdered; and the hero, his wife and their newly-born daughter walking in an idyllic picture straight from a soft-focus 70s chocalate-box commercial. The film's already harrowing content is given further strength by some disturbing connections - eg the first victim, the hero's wife and the killer's wife are all pregnant.
The film brutally contrasts this fertility with a space rank with decay, dirt, the unfinished and abandoned; ugly forests, chill lakes, muddy building sites - the earth is another mother, yielding aborted fragments of non-life. The scrupulously dour realism (recalling all those 70s policiers), verges on Grand Guignol, such as the row of severed heads fished from the lake. The machine that shows the hero the insides of his pregnant wife, and its seemingly peaceful, silent charge echoes the horrific sight of the charred, hacked, naked female body at the autopsy, dirt and insects incrusting a pudenda that in another context should produce life.The film doesn't seem to put much faith in the forces of law and order to contain this poisoned well. The first we see of our crime squad heroes, they are lost because of a failure to read a map. How on earth are they going to read this unimaginable, murderous grid? Their inadequacy is heightened by reference to their home lives. Gomez, the elder of the two, is a brothel-frequenting alcoholic not even speaking to a wife who soon leaves him, with a daughter around the same age as all the victims.
His partner, Fabian, seems more settled, although the film suggests that he is only starting on the road that will lead him to Gomez's shocking fate. The further involved he gets in the case, the more he loses his youthful detachment, falling for porn actresses who look like the murdered girl; picking up hookers while his wife gives birth. The film's grey morality achieves a numbing effect; it is difficult to feel in any way distant, in moral terms, from the murderer and his grisly crimes, no good guys we can side with.Predictably, 'Scenes de crimes' cops out. The more infected and unmanageable the world of the film gets, the more its 'doctors' try to control it, by placing a pattern over it, containing it by science. And the film bears this out, though not before a jolting development in the buddy buddy narrative that simply never happens in these films.
Despite all the horror, there is a source which, once identified and uprooted, will put an end to the ghastliness. The director tries his best to make this ambiguous - the closing image is a heavy-handed attempt at Chabrolian irony - but the fact remains that an ending where Marlow is executed by Kurtz would have been much more frightening; or the suggestion that there are many many more of them out there. Still, wouldn't want to be Fabian's kid!
grespoun
Two french policemen are looking for a serial killer. This film is like a french "Silence of the Lambs". A serial killer leaves headless and handless bodies behind him. There are pretty similar scenes about cutting up dead people to get to know the killer better. But there's no FBI at work here, but the french police. Their methods aren't as sophisticated. And they don't look for a unique madman, cutting up his victims for a special purpose (like producing a skin costume). The killer here is astonishingly normal, simply killing for the pleasure of it, and cutting of heads just to make the work harder for the police, not to keep trophees of any kind. Charles Berling gives an astonishing performance and helps to lead the film in a more phylosophical area, asking one question: What's a life really worth? The answer: In the end it might not be worth much, but it is worth a try having one.
