Coolly measured and unobstreperous thriller that merits praise in kind. The female half of a Dutch couple on holiday in France — neither the happiest nor the unhappiest of couples -- disappears without trace at a rest stop. An interesting situation, slightly remindful of Antonioni's L'Avventura, except that we've seen a thickset and goateed oddball lurking about the place, and taking a page out of the handbook of Ted Bundy: slipping a false cast on one hand and resting it in a sling. So, more strongly remindful of Polanski's Frantic instead: the missing person is presumed to be missing involuntarily. The sudden shift in viewpoint to that of her abductor is interesting too, partly because he's an interesting criminal, a chemistry teacher and family man who spends his leisure hours by himself at a secluded fixer-upper in the countryside, meticulously rehearsing a little pas-de-deux with a vial of chloroform and an imaginary female. We soon gather that we are now in an earlier time-period than the one in which the movie started, so that the shift in viewpoint is interesting additionally as a storytelling strategy, one that will divide the action into sharply varied and intricately interrelated phases. The final phase, three years after the original disappearance, when the husband and kidnapper at last come face to face, fritters away some of the interest for the sake of "psychology," with shifts of viewpoint all the way back to childhood. We never get deep enough into the mind of the criminal, never deeper than his own rationalization, to make this detour worthwhile; and the doubling-back and filling-in manner of narrative begins now to look a little less clever and a little more inefficient and scatterbrained, like the narrative technique of the average moviegoer when called upon to recount a plot ("Oh, I forgot to mention ..."). The climax, however, recaptures our interest with a grip of such asphyxiating tightness that we may be sorry we ever permitted ourselves to take any. Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna Ter Steege; directed by George Sluizer. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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