The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (Cattet & Forzani, 2014)

[colinr0380]

With thanks to Michael Mackenzie's blog for pointing it out, here's the teaser trailer for Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, their next feature following Amer.

[Mr Sausage]

These two sure know how to mimic Italian exploitation cinema--that title is fantastic. Sounds like something that'd get imported to the states and released as "Carnage!" or something.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

Very exciting. Amer was a fantastic giallo pastiche, with a genuinely unnerving opening segment, creepier than anything I've seen recently in horror films.

[colinr0380]

With thanks to Michael Mackenzie's blog for pointing it out, here's the teaser trailer for Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, their next feature following Amer.

And here's the trailer

[Mr Sausage]

Holy shit, that looks amazing. I have no idea how they'll fare at sustaining a feature-length narrative (not that giallos were ever good at that in the first place), but it'll be a visual splendour either way. Can't wait!

[colinr0380]

Tears as in weeping, or tears as in rips? Both are applicable here.

A fascinating and frustratingly elliptical film in equal measure. Think of an Argento film (one of his giallos, or Inferno, with its house full of hidden nooks and crannies; or Tenebrae, with its childhood trauma flashbacks. But then combined with the extreme supernatural stylisations of Suspiria) mixed with a David Lynch film with its characters dropping into fugue states, wandering corridors and approaching ominously significant rooms. Inferno meets Inland Empire?

There are also the brilliant yet incredibly disorientating Triangle-style multiple versions of the main character inhabiting the same space simultaneously, waking to the sound of a doorbell and then killing or being killed during the (nightmare?) scene following finding his wife's decapitated head in his bed. And seemingly a Lucio Fulci influence in the way that a couple of the murders are carried out.

And one amazing, jerky still-yet-moving-shot black and white sequence that almost seems to be channelling Jan Švankmajer’s stop motion films as a woman is stalked in her room by a black leather coat and gloves clad, hat wearing killer who appears from a hat box and can climb walls and walk across ceilings, with the woman escaping by crawling inside her wallpaper and into a strange tunnel before locking herself in a bathroom and masturbating in order to produce three more black-clad killers to bump off her pursuer!

There is definitely a story there, however inexplicable it might seem at first. The main male character returns home from a business trip to find that his wife has disappeared and in his searches for her ends up hearing the stories of the various tenants in the building and of the tormented police officer put on the case.

However the story is very much taking a back seat to heavily foregrounded gender themes. The film is full of people making slits in walls, having objects inserted into their mouths in a kind of symbolic rape, and having various vaginal-shaped open wounds created in them, which all seems to (inevitably for a giallo) stem from the childhood flashback trauma. Yet compared to the rather dull and dopey men (often trapped behind one-way mirrors or whispering through walls or clicking off pictures through their camera lenses) the women have much more agency here, both victims when they want to be (the film has a strong sense of masochism about it and women exploring their sexuality releasing dangerous forces from within themselves), powerful unknowable figures of desire at points (particularly in the sequence of disrobing to reveal a stunningly bright, translucent body that then shatters at the touch of the man, the pieces then piercing his flesh during the subsequent sex scene) and are more often than not the self-assured aggressors.

This film is full of such a barrage of unique and fascinating imagery (perhaps a bit too relentless, and one flaw is that the editing is a bit heavy and disorientating throughout), and the atmosphere laid on so thickly that perhaps it doesn't really matter that I never figured out exactly what was going on, who the killer was, or whether things were supernaturally motivated or not!

[Mr Sausage]

the atmosphere laid on so thickly that perhaps it doesn't really matter that I never figured out exactly what was going on, who the killer was, or whether things were supernaturally motivated or not!

Not inappropriate for this genre!

I haven't seen it yet, but from what you write it seems like the duo are still primarily stylists whose attraction to this subgenre is motivated mainly by the extravagance it allows. It also sounds like they're still not in control of their style: Amer became exhausting, and it sounds like this one does as well. Eagre to see it, tho'.

[swo17]

Tears as in weeping, or tears as in rips? Both are applicable here.

The French larmes just means tears as in weeping, doesn't it? Though I always assumed that they were referring to the *teers* that run from the *tares*. Nice how that works out in English.

[colinr0380]

It is a bit exhausting (everyone has a double, or at the very least a double life, all telling stories which are Russian-dolled together and often so hyper-stylised in the re-telling that it is difficult to figure out the 'truth' of the situation, which all makes it difficult to keep track of who is who at times!) and overall it is not quite the masterpiece that those amazing trailers might suggest, but I loved the chance to finally see those moments in context and there are enough new moments to hold the interest such as that out of nowhere black and white sequence, the kaleidoscopic titles, or the early scene of a woman hearing a murderer approaching her husband through a stethoscope pressed to the ceiling of her bedroom. I love the ellipses that take place in that woman's recounting of her story too! And it all looks gorgeous throughout.

Spoiler

I wonder if the older woman whose apartment the husband visits very early on in the film is the equivalent of one of Argento's Three Mothers, especially with her significant reappearance (doubled and newly back-storied) just before the enigmatic climax. Are all these characters trying to escape from what is tormenting them by changing their identities, their names and the physical appearances, only to be dogged by fears and desires of their past lives that compel them to revisit them or rekindle violent relationships?

It could also be seen as perhaps an extremely strange re-envisioning of Otto Preminger's Laura as much as a giallo homage!

Sight & Sound also picked up on the play on words in their recent review:

The title itself is an enigma, a challenge and a hermeneutic gambit, beginning with a promise of defamiliarisation ('strange') and ending with an odd kenning ('body's tears') that, at least in its English version, involves significant equivocation. For while in normal usage the French 'larmes' can only denote lacrymal secretions, its English translation 'tears' might additionally, depending on how it is pronounced, evoke the rips, holes, wounds, splits and gashes that will form a recurrent eroticised motif in the film. (Though initially unaware of these further implications in their film's English title, writing/directing couple Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet have revealed to me their delight with them).

EDIT: I've also done a quick search and the Cattet and Forzani short for The ABCs of Death film, "O is for Orgasm" (NSFW) is currently up on YouTube. That is still their best piece of work, but it is interesting to see many of these techniques turn up in their later feature (particularly the cigarette melting the plastic body of a doll, which gets re-used in Body's Tears as a moment in which a pair of hands delve bloodlessly into someone's abdomen (or uterus?)).

Second edit (30th November): DVD Beaver review of the US Blu-ray