A Film Canon

The Vanishing opens with a powerful, extended set piece - a young Dutch man and woman are highwaying in France, when she abruptly vanishes into the greatest elaboration of a petrol station since They Live By Night. The stage seems set for a spatial, depsychologised approach to criminology, so it comes as something of a surprise that Sluizer devotes the second act to the criminal's preparations, psychology and family life, and the third to the man's advertisement for, and eventual contact with the criminal, who forces him to relive his girlfriend's ordeal. Fortunately, Sluizer manages to move beyond the fairly labored insistence on the criminal's normality to something more like banality and, in doing so, creates the film's most striking aesthetic gesture; namely, to flatten the highway system with the same banality, completely eschewing any of the expansive, sublime overtones of the opening credit sequence, in a vision of highway travel as a fundamentally claustrophobic experience, a fusion of car and coffin. As a result, what could have been an interminable rehearsal and reiteration of the crime becomes a kind of narrative live burial, a relentless drive to chamber knowledge - the French title is The Man Who Wanted To Know - that ends up transforming driving itself into little more than a mobile chamber drama. In this way, Sluizer crafts a quintessentially European road film, almost entirely disinterested in what's taking place outside the car, or even in the car itself - an interminable, existential tunnel that ultimately proved too merciless and monochromatic for his American remake.