Sluizer's thrilling 'Spoorloos' a frightening Dutch film treat

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): A young couple from Amsterdam drives to France for a vacation, stopping at a gas station in the border town of Nimes. As the man fills up the car's gas tank, the woman goes inside the store to get some drinks. She never reappears.

So begins the nightmarish Spoorloos, also known as The Vanishing (the Dutch word literally means "without a trace"). The film jumps to three years later, with Rex (Gene Bervoets) still preoccupied with the disappearance of his girlfriend Saskia (Johanna ter Steege).

For the past three years he has put up signs and posters bearing her picture, seeking information on her whereabouts. Although Rex has another girlfriend, Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus), he mainly neglects her, obsessively drawn into the exhaustive search for the missing Saskia.

The film curiously brings us to another character, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a pudgy, middle-aged French chemistry teacher, who is happily married and a father of two loving teenage daughters. At first, it seems that the only unusual thing about him is his weird-looking beard. But after we see him testing a chloroform-soaked handkerchief on himself, and later practicing luring strangers into his car, he begins to give us a really creepy feeling.

All suspicions are confirmed as Lemorne comes to Rex in Amsterdam and tells him, "I'm the man you're looking for, I know where Saskia is".

Rex is subsequently persuaded to join Lemorne in his car on his drive back to Nimes, subjugating his feeling of unease to indulge his burning curiosity. The trip becomes a revealing look into the mind of a demented person as Lemorne tells Rex of his childhood and his past experiences.

"I have a slight abnormality in my personality, not noticeable to those around me," says Lemorne. "You could find me in the encyclopedia under 'sociopath'."

Dutch film director George Sluizer challenges the minds of the viewers by presenting a unilinear film structure, blurring the lines of past and present and switching between the inner heads of the two principal characters.

The story, adapted by Tim Krabbe from his novel The Golden Egg, begins with an intriguing mystery and proceeds to make us observers of the obsessions of two men: Rex, who cannot continue living with what Lemorne dub "the uncertainty, the eternal not- knowing", and Lemorne himself, who wants to conduct an experiment about destiny, to find out if a person who is capable of doing good, heroic acts also has the potential to commit evil. The film is basically the mind game between the two and the audience finds out who prevails in the surprising, grim conclusion.

Sluizer actually went to the United States to make the Hollywood version of this film in 1993. Similarly titled, it's basically a shot-by-shot replica of this 1988 original, with some alterations, and with Jeff Bridges playing the psychopath, Kiefer Sutherland as the man looking for his missing girlfriend and Sandra Bullock as the kidnapped girl.

The story is even somewhat recycled in the 1997 Kurt Russell thriller Breakdown. But the first The Vanishing remains the more solid, more stylistic and most unforgettable one. You will still have goose bumps long after you leave the theater.

The Vanishing will be shown at Erasmus Huis on Sunday, July 25, 1999, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.