Usually a European director attempting a Hollywood film genre means trouble, but in the case of Mathieu Kassovitz’s serial-killer thriller The Crimson Rivers, the match, for the most part, seems serendipitous. Only a Frenchman, for example, could render a maggoty, mutilated corpse as a thing of beauty, which is the case in the film’s credit sequence as photographer Thierry Arbogast’s camera caresses a naked trussed body intimately infested by vermin. Unlike the exploitative and pretentious detailings of David Fincher’s Seven (1995) — to which Rivers has been compared, mostly by the film’s distributors, as in " The Silence of the Lambs meets . . .  " — Kassovitz’s carnage evokes pathos, dread, even sublimity. It recalls more the tragic atmosphere and visionary images that distinguish Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece of the genre than Fincher’s smug knockoff — a chilling European sensibility sustains the film even as the inevitable, debased conventions kick in at the end.

The dead man is a librarian at a mysterious, self-contained university deep in the French Alps, a slaty, damp fortress of Albert Speer–like design with a myrmidon-like student body, a ubiquitous logo of a cruciform figure, and a tradition of inbreeding going back to mediæval times. Whoever committed the crime certainly went mediæval on the victim: the hands are cut off and the stumps cauterized, the eyes are gouged out and replaced with decades-old rainwater (which drips out on the autopsy table as a post-mortem tear, one of many creepy but subtle touches). So they bring in legendary Paris detective Pierre Niémans (Jean Reno, looking a little mediæval himself), a hardboiled veteran known for cracking the weird ones (you know he’s tough because when they uncover the stiff, he’s the only one who doesn’t grimace).

Meanwhile, in another town several valleys away, hotshot young cop Max Kerkerian (Nomar Garciaparra look-alike Vincent Cassel) checks out a far less glamorous crime — a graveyard desecration. Vandals have painted swastikas on the crypt of a 10-year-old girl who’s been dead for almost a decade, and the gung-ho, street-savvy Kerkerian, perhaps bored by his sleepy provincial assignment, pursues every lead to solve the crime, moving from a break-in at a local school to a run-in with some half-hearted skinheads (a kung fu interval that is an early concession to genre expectations) to an eerie interview with the dead girl’s mother (European screen icon Dominique Sanda unnerving as an insane nun who has taken the " vow of shadows " ).

You can see the buddy movie emerging from this murk a mile away, but to his credit Kassovitz keeps his two sleuths separate for as long as possible because, as both correctly insist, they work better alone. Of the two, Max is the more engaging — cynical, unformed, and hotblooded, he propels the film forward. Pierre, despite such character quirks as a fear of dogs, a penchant for breaking down doors, and a bad case of weltschmerz, seems almost as cold and stiff as the bodies he uncovers as he follows the killer’s trail of grisly clues. His love complication with Fanny Ferreira (Nadia Farès), a tough-cookie Alpinist who’s one of the chief witnesses, seems more an afterthought than a growing obsession.

Nonetheless, the concatenation of clues and paranoid interconnections proves irresistible even as suspicion grows that the screenplay (it’s written by Kassovitz and Jean-Christophe Grangé based on the latter’s bestseller) won’t tie things up as tightly as, say, the opening cadaver. Kassovitz, whose previous film, La haine (1995), starred Cassel in a gritty if overwrought examination of contemporary French racism, touches here on issues of neo-Nazism, eugenics, and latter-day " Übermenschen " worship (that’s the title of the first victim’s unfinished PhD thesis, a kind of Mein Kampf for the new millennium) but allows these themes to deteriorate into plot gimmicks and Boys from Brazil–like kitsch.

Even as the film dithers into old-cop/young-cop banter and contrivances like mystery twins and missing digits, Kassovitz can still unload gasp-inducing visual tropes like the glinting womb of a glacier tunnel and the dim glow of a ski gondola’s lights looming in a misty void like a pair of eyes. Whether in the end the tradition of Hollywood formula undermines that of European artiness or vice versa is arguable, but The Crimson Rivers seems a sturdy merging of the two bloodlines.

Issue Date: August 30 - September 6, 2001