Locarno Film Festival Review: The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (2013)

Cast: Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener
Director: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Country: Belgium | France | Luxembourg
Genre: Horror
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: The following review is part of our coverage of the Locarno International Film Festival. For more information on the festival visit pardolive.ch and follow the Locarno International Film Festival on Twitter at @FilmFestLocarno.

The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears could be a trainwreck of a film and still maintain pride of place in the giallo canon solely for that stupendous title. Right on par with, perhaps even above, the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, this is a name that grabs the attention and pins it to the wall like a burly bar patron whose drink’s just been spilled. It’s every bit as frightening an experience too: bearing no shortage of resemblances—in formal and stylistic terms—to Beyond the Black Rainbow, this second feature from acclaimed Amer directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is an uncompromisingly bold vision of a movie, oppressive in atmosphere and obsessive in detail.

It’s a love letter to giallo and all its base brutality, engaging forthright in the down-and-dirty sensibility that characterises the subgenre while all the while elevating it to the level of artistry its greatest practitioners attained.

The nominal story is that of a businessman who returns home from a trip abroad to find his apartment locked yet empty and his wife mysteriously missing. That’s as far as Cattet and Forzani’s concessions toward traditional storytelling go; it’s but five minutes into the film when their twisted descent into nightmarish visions begins, and the movie disappears down a rabbit hole of red-filtered fantasy. Cattet and Forzani’s firmest strength as a directorial team is the incredible faith they have in their artistic proclivities. Half measures simply would not suffice here; it’s the remarkable conviction with which their style is delivered that makes of their movie so formidable a force, its power never lost by way of deigning to concede ground to the audience.

That’s not to suggest any sort of pretentious contempt for the viewer; an art film this may be, but it’s the “low” art of blood and guts, permeated by knives in the night and piercing screams. It’s a love letter to giallo and all its base brutality, engaging forthright in the down-and-dirty sensibility that characterises the subgenre while all the while elevating it to the level of artistry its greatest practitioners attained. There’s an all-too prevalent notion that horror is the provocation of physical reaction at the expense of mental stimulation. The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears exposes such thinking for the fallacy it is: this is a movie that accesses the brain by way of the guts, working through the discomfort it generates in the stomach up to the mind, inviting us to ask just why we feel so out of place.

Tapping layers of dreams so deep it makes Inception seem a light nap by contrast, the film’s striking structure owes debts equally to M.C. Escher and Maya Deren, repeatedly folding in atop itself with a frightening frequency that foregrounds the questions of relative reality on which the movie dwells.

Rusty French precludes precise translation, but the movie’s credits include the wonderfully unique “special scream provided by Peter Strickland” acknowledgement, a fitting hat-tip to a filmmaker with whom Cattet and Forzani’s style feels fully in-check. Precise sound design is every bit as important here as it was to Berberian Sound Studio, integral to the creation of the oppressive atmosphere the directors use to immerse us entirely and unwillingly in the sensory nightmare of its protagonist. Tapping layers of dreams so deep it makes Inception seem a light nap by contrast, the film’s striking structure owes debts equally to M.C. Escher and Maya Deren, repeatedly folding in atop itself with a frightening frequency that foregrounds the questions of relative reality on which the movie dwells. It’s an epileptic, apoplectic assault, a collage of colour and sound that treats screen space as psychological space, and thrusts us into a psyche bruised beyond repair.

Despite its plentiful evident influences, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is an experience all of its own, a wholly unique psychosexual horror whose prominent symbolism and psychical concerns are every bit as important as the basic drive to batter the viewer into submission with a blistering flurry of visual and aural stimulation. This is cinema at its most engaging, though not necessarily most entertainingly so: it is, by design, a maddening experience, obstinately opaque and aggressively abstract. Yet it builds to a succinct, sensible climax, revealing the true genius of the title not to lie in its creative grandiosity, but the eerie, uninformed innocence it projects.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Having spent the vast majority of my life sharing in the all too prevalent belief than cinema is merely dumbed-down weekend escapism for the masses, I was lucky enough to turn on a television at the exact right moment to have my perspectives on the medium completely transformed. Those first two and a half hours marked the beginning of a new life revolving around—maybe even depending upon—the screen and the depth of artistry, intellectual stimulation, and emotional exhilaration it can provide.

Latest posts by Ronan Doyle (see all)

• This Week on Demand: 18/08/2013 - August 20, 2013
• Locarno Film Festival: If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal, Roxanne, The Special Need, The Green Years, 2001: A Space Odyssey, It Should Happen to You, and Mouton - August 19, 2013
• Locarno Film Festival Review: Short Term 12 (2013) - August 15, 2013