The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)

 

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani made Amer, a film I thought was quite an astounding homage to giallo thrillers of the past so when I caught wind of The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013), I was really stoked about what these two could come up with next. Well, on Shudder, the film is in their channel rotation and over the last few late nights in October, I've come across it at about the same point. 

I'm the first to admit that I'm caught in their web if strictly because of the experience of never seeing anything like it. I do admit that it is exhausting, challenging, exhilarating, sensual, overwhelming, frustrating, narratively uncompromising in its unwillingness to surrender to conventional moviemaking storytelling, and visually intense in its use of color, closeups, and visceral violence. The razor cuts flesh and the sound of the blade doing so certainly reiterates what damage it can do. Intense color schemes are very much the aesthetic of choice, as well as, the use of split screen. There isn't a technique or POV these two filmmakers don't try. Glass clinging about in booze in a small glass or match strikes that too often fail to generate a flame, tips of knives pressing against naked nipples, hands under the surface of flesh and wallpaper, penetrating eyes pointedly focused on specific targets, meticulously framed wounds opening, blood spatter exploding after gunshot, shattering glass, and zooms into vagina-like stab holes in the head. I read they took years to shoot and finish the film, and it is understandable why, all things considering. But because the narrative is of the least importance to the duo who made it, I think that will certainly alienate an audience just not as patient and interested in their compulsions. Even some giallo fans might find their indulgences and creative license on no ordinary takes and insistence on making even police interview/interrogation scenes surreal perhaps tiresome. I have always loved how the duo capture beautiful, alluring, sexual women, in various forms, from at the height of pleasure to the depths of horror. They just take me into a realm that reminds me of their influences while incorporating them without just relying on them as fan service. Yes a camera might move around a building similar to Argento's "Tenebre" and a backseat passenger in a car might be bathed in color while traveling to a destination at the beginning, with the camera right in the face of characters...but the duo aren't complacent with just pulling from the past masters and nothing else. They carry us into the dark void, with even flashbacks and conversations about flashbacks articulated in a visual medium that could be seen as off-putting, pretentious, self-indulgent, overtly artsy, and overwrought...but, at the same time, others might find themselves absorbed into the experience, their minds run roughshod by everything Cattet and Forzani unload on them, so caught off-guard while also blown away at what comes at them, seemingly without a break. I think this will always be a divisive experience, with plenty of naysayers and champions of the work. 

Oh, the plot: a telecommunications businessman returns from Frankfort to find his wife missing, despite a locked chain on the door. He looks for her, obviously interested in her whereabouts, encountering odd tenants and an intimidating detective. The building -- a striking architecturally designed location, with stairs / stairwell twisting into a multi-floor coil -- is presented as this enigmatic, quirky, maddeningly nightmarish place that never feels like home...nothing warm, cozy, or comfortable about this setting.