Log

Here are four extraordinary shots in Sombre from possible thousands.

I selected these consecutive images not because they distill the film’s aesthetic organization — in fact they introduce a rupture, one of several. I chose them because they form a pattern my eyes can keep up with on first viewing. It strikes me that, for all its overwhelming turbulence and inscrutability, much of which I have yet to grasp, this film’s logic resides primarily in a frantic, relentless search for rhymes and resolutions of patterns. Notice the tear across the top of the frame in the first shot, the silhouette of Jean’s head and shoulders jutting from darkness into the crystalline water. The next shot obliterates the horizon line, which had already threatened to lift itself out of the preceding frame, by means of a strangely semi-focused close-up on the water. The third shot reclaims the horizon, or at least the horizontal, now back where it belongs in the middle of the frame; its familiar symmetry (largely unfamiliar to the film’s world so far) would be comforting if not for the truly dazzling introduction of vibrant green, which we’ve only glimpsed in snatches to this point and which startles in this relatively static image. This won’t come through in a still, but tiny black dots — our characters — quietly rip a diagonal path on their way to the water, above which we’re suddenly poised in the fourth shot. The back of Claire’s head may seem unremarkable here, but it’s vitally important in the film’s overall visual system. Perhaps the most persistent composition in the film — one you might find conventional in another film — is a silhouetted head in the center of the frame, dividing the surfaces that reflect what little light the camera can absorb with what amounts to a rip, a tear, into or out of which no light can pass.

It might be tempting to make symbols out the film’s literal darkness; surely this would be the first way one might try to alleviate the frustration of not being able to see “properly.” But it should be obvious by the time you make it to the end of the film that there’s simply too much to organize into, say, an explanation of darkness as a correlative to Jean’s pathological behavior. Instead the film demands we submit to its logic rather than force our own upon it. Not only are we provided the continual accumulation of patterns and their inevitable, violent dissolutions, the film also asks us to “watch” what’s happening with our ears, as often the particularities of location (feet disrupting gravel) and the physical action (the sudden shift from exhalations of pleasure to confused pain, followed by the cessation of the breath that’s not Jean’s) are only evident on the soundtrack.

The sequence at the water ends with an extraordinary pan that appears to be searching for complement to the first shot I mention above. Frustrated by the incessant undulations of the treetops, resigned to its abandonment of Jean’s head and back, the camera’s unable to settle on the precisely jagged contours of that water-filled rip. Instead it comes to rest on rustling leaves that fill the frame in abstract semi-focus, itself recalling a dazzling earlier moment in which weeds on the side of the road gradually devolve into something like Brakhage scratching as the car speeds past. Much more could be made of this.