Based on a 1984 Dutch novel entitled Het Gouden Ei ("The Golden Egg") by journalist and chess enthusiast Tim Krabbé, The Vanishing [1988] (originally entitled Spoorloos) was adapted for the screen by the novel's author and the film's director, George Sluizer. A veteran on the European cinematic scene since the 1950s, Sluizer made his directorial debut in 1971 with the Rotterdam-shot music festival film Stamping Ground on which he worked with Jan de Bont and Roger Spottiswoode. His more notable credits included directing the 1979 Bibi Andersson and Anthony Perkins drama Twice a Woman and producing Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo in 1981, but he blindsided international audiences in 1988 with this taut, horrifying thriller with a malicious Edgar Allan Poe-style twist.
First screened at festivals in 1988 and shown throughout Europe over the following year, The Vanishing only reached American shores in 1990 as an art house release. Audience and critical response quickly made it a hot ticket item, with few willing to spoil the startling ending in what amounted to a dry run for later similar promotions for The Crying Game [1992] and The Sixth Sense [1999]. Among its champions was critic Roger Ebert, who lauded the film as it "advances in a tantalizing fashion, supplying information obliquely, suggesting as much as it tells, and everything leads up to a climax that is as horrifying as it is probably inevitable."
Still a relatively new face on movie screen, Bervoets had only made six films by the time he played the complex, tragic role of Rex and had previously essayed a leading role in the perverse 1987 Belgian art-horror anthology, Crazy Love. He managed to parlay this film's success into a long and still busy career, often appearing in major roles for Dutch television.
His female co-star, Johanna ter Steege, had never acted on film before and originally intended to only become a stage actress. Her performance contains only a limited amount of screen time, but her indelible impression earned her Berlin's Felix Award for Best Supporting Actress and immediately led to a string of high-profile film roles in Robert Altman's Vincent & Theo (1990), István Szabó's Meeting Venus (1991), and Bernard Rose's Immortal Beloved (1994). The international portion of her career wound down abruptly when she was cast in Stanley Kubrick's Holocaust drama The Aryan Papers, which was planned to go into production in 1993 but was canceled by the director who didn't want to be seen as an imitator of Schindler's List. The months of waiting for a project that was never meant to be caused her to split her time more evenly between stage work and occasional film and TV appearances, including a role as a different kind of Saskia opposite Klaus Maria Brandauer in the 1999 film Rembrandt.
The unforgettable portrayal of the psychopathic Raymond Lemorne is one of many highlights in the career of the late Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, a proficient French character actor. With over one hundred credits to his name, he began with bit roles in films such as Roman Polanski's The Tenant (1976) and also worked with Sluizer on the aforementioned Twice a Woman. His first major international role came in 1982 with the titular role in The Return of Martin Guerre, a character impersonated in the film's story by Gérard Depardieu. He soon became a staple in prominent films including Alain Resnais' Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), Nagisa Oshima's Max Mon Amour (1986), and Bertrand Tavernier's The Passion of Beatrice (1987). His villainous turn in The Vanishing also earned him a Best Actor award at Portugal's prestigious Fantasporto Festival.
Apart from its own considerable merits, The Vanishing also occupies an unusual place in the cinematic history books as one of the few films to be remade by its own director in America. This unexpected twist turned many heads from film fans hesitant to see what the transition to Hollywood would do to this delicate, psychological horror story; while the same filmmaker guiding his film from one language to another wasn't quite unprecedented (Roger Vadim had sort of done the same thing with his 1988 reinterpretation of And God Created Woman), the small time frame between these two versions was a significant anomaly. Produced by 20th Century Fox, the 1993 American version of The Vanishing cast Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, and Sandra Bullock in the key roles from the original film while expanding a minor part in the original to a significant new role for Nancy Travis. Despite a handful of arresting visuals and a quirky score by Jerry Goldsmith, the remake outraged viewers with its new gore-drenched climax and tacked-on happy ending, negating the point of the entire narrative for most fans of the original.
Sluizer (who had directed the acclaimed 1992 film Utz in the interim) returned to Europe and directed a handful of additional features including the memorable 2002 fantasy The Stone Raft, but his unexpected career move with his most famous film inspired several subsequent foreign directors to attempt a similar feat at taking two cracks at the same story including Michael Haneke (Funny Games, 1997 and 2007), the Pang Brothers (Bangkok Dangerous, 1999 and 2008), Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch, 1994 and 1997), and Géla Babluani (13: Game of Death, 2005 and 2010). Regardless of the merits of his second attempt, few will dispute that his original version of The Vanishing retains its status as one of the screen's most chilling depictions of obsession and aberrant psychology.
Producers: Anne Lordon, George Sluizer
Director: George Sluizer
Screenplay: Tim Krabbe (screenplay and novel); George Sluizer (adaptation)
Cinematography: Toni Kuhn
Art Direction: Santiago Isidro Pin
Music: Henny Vrienten
Film Editing: Lin Friedman, George Sluizer
Cast: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu (Raymond Lemorne), Gene Bervoets (Rex Hofman), Johanna ter Steege (Saskia Wagter), Gwen Eckhaus (Lieneke), Bernadette Le Sache (Simone Lemorne), Tania Latarjet (Denise Lemorne), Lucille Glenn (Gabrielle 'Gaby' Lemorne), Roger Souza (Manager), Caroline Appere (Cashier), Pierre Forget (Farmer Laurent).
C-120M.
by Nathaniel Thompson
References:
Official Tim Krabbé Site: http:// www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/
Official George Sluizer Site: http://www.georgesluizer.com/
Chicago Sun-Times Review by Roger Ebert, January 25, 1991.
"Unfolding the Aryan Papers" (http://animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/unfolding)
Fantasporto (http://www.fantasporto.com/)
IMDB
