journal features

movie review - The Crimson Rivers

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2002.09.08

This is a French flick about two detectives (Jean Reno, Vincent Cassel) following two separate crimes (a murder at a University in an isolated town in France's mountainous east, and the break-in of a crypt in a cemetary). As the film progresses, they follow investigations that lead them to one another; they ultimately meet at gun-point when the descend on the house of a man who is linked to both events.

The film's pacing is quite good, and it wastes little time wending through a plot that is both original and intriguing (with a couple of gentle wobbles towards the end). And the cinematography is quite unusual for French films; it includes quite a range of shots and scenes.

Over all, a worthwhile film.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)