Movies - The Vanishing

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The Vanishing (1988 film)

	Movies - The Vanishing

The Vanishing (Spoorloos) is a film directed by George Sluizer and produced by Anne Lordon and George Sluizer. Based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé it was released internationally in 1988 and is in French and Dutch. The film was later remade by Sluizer in English. The latter version was rewritten and most say it lost the near perfect atmosphere of the original (for example, the original got a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, while the remake only got 50%).

Story

A Dutch couple, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia Wagter (Johanna ter Steege), are on a cycling holiday in France. Their car runs out of gas and they are stranded inside a tunnel. They quarrel for a while, but make up and eventually get going again.

Later they stop at a gas station. Here Saskia goes into the shop for drinks and never returns. Rex waits, getting more worried and nervous by the minute as Saskia does not emerge. He soon starts to question people if they have seen her, but no one has any idea as to where she is. The only clue he has is a blurred photo he took of the surrounding area, in which he can just barely make out her red hair in a group of people next to the gas station entrance.

Rex can not accept his loss and three years after her vanishing he still compulsively looks for her. He has a new girlfriend, but she is so fed up with his obsession to understand Saskia's ultimate fate that she leaves him. His quest even results in him explaining her story on television.

In a series of intermittent flashbacks, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a respectable, though quirky, middle-class chemistry teacher, the kidnapper of Saskia, appears both alone and with his family, intricately plotting and planning his scheme to capture a random woman and murder her.

Eventually, Raymond, fascinated by Rex's fanatical compulsion to know what happened to Saskia, confronts Rex and admits to her kidnapping. He explains that he felt the need to test himself, to know whether he deserved others' high opinion of him, by finding out whether he could commit what for him was the ultimate act of evil. Rex's ultimate curiosity concerning Saskia keeps him from killing Raymond, which Raymond is fully aware of. Raymond finally invites Rex to the very same park and gas station where Saskia disappeared, and simply tells Rex that if he drinks a cup of coffee, supposedly spiked, he will know what happened to Saskia. After tormenting himself in undecision, Rex eventually drinks the concoction, falls unconscious, and wakes up to the final scene of Raymond burying him alive. For Raymond, a claustrophobe, this is the ultimate crime.

Cast

The cast includes:

Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu
Gene Bervoets
Johanna ter Steege
Gwen Eckhaus
Bernadette Le Saché
Tania Latarjet
Lucille Glenn

The music was produced by Henry Vrienten. It was edited by George Sluizer and Lin Friedman. The art director was Santiago Isidro Pin. Sound was managed by Piotr van Dijk. Photography was directed by Toni Kuhn. It was adapted by George Sluizer and the screenplay was written by Tim Krabbé from the novel, The Golden Egg.

Awards

European Film Award, Best Supporting Actress, Johanna ter Steege (1988)
Nederlands Film Festival, Dutch Film Critics Award, George Sluizer (1988)
Nederlands Film Festival, Golden Calf (Best Film), George Sluizer, Anne Lordon (1988)

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Vanishing (1988 film) ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The Vanishing (1988 film); it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay