'Scenes de crimes' purports to depict a dark, disturbing malaise that seems to infect the very geography of France; less the vile outrages of a lone serial killer than a moral sickness spreading over the nation, a numbing disease that reduces the young, the future, to disassembled body parts. There is a touch of reactionary sentiment perhaps here, as the victims are all drug-takers, hitchhikers, sexually promiscuous, teenage pregnancies, punished for their transgression; but so are their parents for their lack of control.
This is a film that is obsessed with families - it opens and closes with images of family, a teenager who refuses to go on holidays with her parents, and is later brutally tortured and murdered; and the hero, his wife and their newly-born daughter walking in an idyllic picture straight from a soft-focus 70s chocalate-box commercial. The film's already harrowing content is given further strength by some disturbing connections - eg the first victim, the hero's wife and the killer's wife are all pregnant.
The film brutally contrasts this fertility with a space rank with decay, dirt, the unfinished and abandoned; ugly forests, chill lakes, muddy building sites - the earth is another mother, yielding aborted fragments of non-life. The scrupulously dour realism (recalling all those 70s policiers), verges on Grand Guignol, such as the row of severed heads fished from the lake. The machine that shows the hero the insides of his pregnant wife, and its seemingly peaceful, silent charge echoes the horrific sight of the charred, hacked, naked female body at the autopsy, dirt and insects incrusting a pudenda that in another context should produce life.
The film doesn't seem to put much faith in the forces of law and order to contain this poisoned well. The first we see of our crime squad heroes, they are lost because of a failure to read a map. How on earth are they going to read this unimaginable, murderous grid? Their inadequacy is heightened by reference to their home lives. Gomez, the elder of the two, is a brothel-frequenting alcoholic not even speaking to a wife who soon leaves him, with a daughter around the same age as all the victims.
His partner, Fabian, seems more settled, although the film suggests that he is only starting on the road that will lead him to Gomez's shocking fate. The further involved he gets in the case, the more he loses his youthful detachment, falling for porn actresses who look like the murdered girl; picking up hookers while his wife gives birth. The film's grey morality achieves a numbing effect; it is difficult to feel in any way distant, in moral terms, from the murderer and his grisly crimes, no good guys we can side with.
Predictably, 'Scenes de crimes' cops out. The more infected and unmanageable the world of the film gets, the more its 'doctors' try to control it, by placing a pattern over it, containing it by science. And the film bears this out, though not before a jolting development in the buddy buddy narrative that simply never happens in these films.
Despite all the horror, there is a source which, once identified and uprooted, will put an end to the ghastliness. The director tries his best to make this ambiguous - the closing image is a heavy-handed attempt at Chabrolian irony - but the fact remains that an ending where Marlow is executed by Kurtz would have been much more frightening; or the suggestion that there are many many more of them out there. Still, wouldn't want to be Fabian's kid!
This is a film that is obsessed with families - it opens and closes with images of family, a teenager who refuses to go on holidays with her parents, and is later brutally tortured and murdered; and the hero, his wife and their newly-born daughter walking in an idyllic picture straight from a soft-focus 70s chocalate-box commercial. The film's already harrowing content is given further strength by some disturbing connections - eg the first victim, the hero's wife and the killer's wife are all pregnant.
The film brutally contrasts this fertility with a space rank with decay, dirt, the unfinished and abandoned; ugly forests, chill lakes, muddy building sites - the earth is another mother, yielding aborted fragments of non-life. The scrupulously dour realism (recalling all those 70s policiers), verges on Grand Guignol, such as the row of severed heads fished from the lake. The machine that shows the hero the insides of his pregnant wife, and its seemingly peaceful, silent charge echoes the horrific sight of the charred, hacked, naked female body at the autopsy, dirt and insects incrusting a pudenda that in another context should produce life.
The film doesn't seem to put much faith in the forces of law and order to contain this poisoned well. The first we see of our crime squad heroes, they are lost because of a failure to read a map. How on earth are they going to read this unimaginable, murderous grid? Their inadequacy is heightened by reference to their home lives. Gomez, the elder of the two, is a brothel-frequenting alcoholic not even speaking to a wife who soon leaves him, with a daughter around the same age as all the victims.
His partner, Fabian, seems more settled, although the film suggests that he is only starting on the road that will lead him to Gomez's shocking fate. The further involved he gets in the case, the more he loses his youthful detachment, falling for porn actresses who look like the murdered girl; picking up hookers while his wife gives birth. The film's grey morality achieves a numbing effect; it is difficult to feel in any way distant, in moral terms, from the murderer and his grisly crimes, no good guys we can side with.
Predictably, 'Scenes de crimes' cops out. The more infected and unmanageable the world of the film gets, the more its 'doctors' try to control it, by placing a pattern over it, containing it by science. And the film bears this out, though not before a jolting development in the buddy buddy narrative that simply never happens in these films.
Despite all the horror, there is a source which, once identified and uprooted, will put an end to the ghastliness. The director tries his best to make this ambiguous - the closing image is a heavy-handed attempt at Chabrolian irony - but the fact remains that an ending where Marlow is executed by Kurtz would have been much more frightening; or the suggestion that there are many many more of them out there. Still, wouldn't want to be Fabian's kid!
