The Crimson Rivers movie review (2001)
Niemans is investigating the murder of a man who is found hanging 150 feet in the air in the fetal position, blinded, his hands amputated. Kerkerian is investigating the desecration of a tomb containing a child whose mother said she was killed by the devil.
The investigations are in a spectacularly forlorn valley in the French Alps, where a famous university clings to the slopes. The children of its teachers go to school here, and eventually become professors themselves; there are hints of problems with inbreeding. The university dean is the "mayor of the valley," and he haughtily tells Niemans: "We all live in perfect harmony. To accuse one of us is to accuse all of us, including me."
Niemans has nobody he wants to accuse. The murder is baffling. "The hands and eyes are the body parts that belong to us alone," the surgeon tells him after the autopsy, adding that in his opinion the victim was tortured for hours. Plodding through his investigation, morose, inward, afraid of dogs, Niemans meets Kerkerian and then meets him again. Why do their two cases seem to lead to the same places?
The movie is as good-looking as any film this year. It is cold, wet and gray, like "The Silence of the Lambs," and its mountain fastness doesn't look like a place for a ski holiday, but like a place where you could be lost and never found. Kassovitz's camera gives us the sensation of these peaks and altitudes by moving with uncanny grace through high empty spaces: There was one shot that had me frankly baffled about where the camera could possibly be positioned.
Notice, too, how an innocuous visit to a university library somehow becomes a venture into the research room of hell. The room is architecturally beautiful (so is the university--Guernon, in Modane-Avrieux), but Kassovitz and his cinematographer, Thierry Arbogast, somehow light it and move through it so that every innocent student seems to glance up from satanic studies. The entire university--the grounds, the labs, the dean's office--has this unwholesome quality, and if you could figure out how Kassovitz does it you'd learn something about the craft of filmmaking, because he starts with a picture postcard.
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