• One of the numerous subtle highlights of The Vanishing is a brief conversation, in French, between Dutch-speaking Rex Hoffman (Gene Bervoets) and an unnamed teenage checkout-girl (Caroline Appere) at a French motorway service-station - Hoffman is searching for his missing girlfriend (wife?) Saskia (Johanna Ter Steege):

Rex : Madame, elle a un pantalon blanc - un jean - et un maillot jaune.

(She's wearing white trousers - jeans - and a yellow jersey.)

Girl : Maillot Jaune? C'est Fignon qui l'a.

(Yellow Jersey? It's Fignon who has that.)

• Though the main action takes place in 1987, the date of Saskia's disappearance is thus identified as 13th September, 1984. This was Day 17 of the Tour de France, whose progress is audible on the radios playing throughout this sequence of the film, and crucial because it featured the punishing Alpe d'Huez stage during which the race's balance of power shifted from the physical Bernard Hinault to the bookish Laurent Fignon: "the fight begins! It's a battle of giants." The Vanishing is one of the great cycling movies, though no cycles are actually ridden during the film itself (those belonging to Rex and Saskia are stolen during his panicky search of the service-station, a nicely cruel insult-to-injury moment).

• The Vanishing turns into a battle of wits and wills between the impulsive, aggressive Rex and the intellectual Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu). And Lemorne is nothing if not competitive: witness the seemingly non-sequitur moment when he pompously argues with a senior citizen about how old the latter is. Fastidiously neat science-teacher Lemorne - self-acknowledged sociopath and claustrophobe - sees other people as variables in an experiment. At one crucial point he says he intends to seek "une nouvelle experience" which the English subtitles mistranslate as "a new experience". In this context, the phrase actually means "a new experiment".

• Rex, however, is not exactly 100 per cent "normal", even before he becomes obsessed by Saskia's disappearance - witness his crazy scheme, on the day of the vanishing, to check coins deposited in a drinks-machine on the basis that their milled edges may bear the kidnapper's fingerprints. It's also notable how much his language-skills improve: in 1984 his "maillot jaune" blunder is picked up by the check-out girl (who's nobody's idea of a madame); later his French improves to the point where he can trade barbs with Lemorne in Lemorne's own French.

• Tim Krabbe's script (based on his own novel, which oddly contains no Tour de France references despite Krabbe's own cycling expertise and interest) takes its place alongside Harry, He's Here To Help as a Patricia-Highsmithian exploration of the bizarre not-quite-symbiotic relationship - more like a Hinault/Fignon duel - between two men. Thus it's the unseen Raymond - and not the equally invisible Saskia - being referred to by Rex's 1987 girlfriend Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus) when she says she doesn't want to be part of a "menage a trois".

• The film's special appeal is the way quotidian reality gradually gives way - as the (1984/1987 European) daylight fades - to madness and horror (note how Lemorne keeps his sandwiches neatly inside his plastic box.) Sluizer - perhaps prefiguring the botch-job he made of the 1993 remake - does go a fair way to wrecking Krabbe's amazing script with the cheesy abundance of eighties incidental muzak. But he does strike a brilliant balance between daft humour and the thriller aspects - at times the picture seems to work primarily as a very dark comedy: almost slapstick, as when Lemorne (fond of munching an eclair or two) staunches a sneeze with the handkerchief he's just doused in chloroform. He inflicts a series of semi-comic humiliations on Rex, and even the final twist is something of a black joke (and Rex does laugh).

• The film's virtue is its strangeness : comedy / thriller / horror elements fall into place atop a philosophical subtext that adds depth - analysis of destiny and free will (blissful ignorance is a preferable option - Rex pays a dire price for wanting to know), where the predestined is expressed as that which has been "written" (ecrit), somewhat ironic as we're watching actors following a script, itself based on a published novel. Like Raymond, The Vanishing has "a little abnormality" that makes all the difference. The film itself is as fastidious for detail as Lemorne (note the different signs for Nimes' Beaux Arts cafe over the years)... Can a film itself be sociopathic?

25th December, 2004
[seen on DVD, Sunderland, 8th November]

click here for Neil's previous review of The Vanishing