The first 45 minutes of The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears lay the foundation for a full-throated suspense thriller that might have felt at home in the ‘70s. Sadly, the last hour degenerates into a monotonous slash-fest that’s too preoccupied with its own weirdness to bother with our enjoyment. By the end, you may be unsure what is real and what is imagined, but you’re damn certain you no longer care.
The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears Written & Directed by Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet Belgium, 2013 The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is a truly cinematic experience, utilizing all the elements of film to embody complicated feelings and concepts. It is not a simple homage but a mutation where the syntax of giallo …
Directing duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s debut feature Amer explored a young woman’s sexual awakening using traditional giallo tropes. An exercise in formalism, it treated giallo as pure aesthetic: a cinematic language with the potential to go beyond its usual generic applications. The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, reportedly 11 years in the making, represents another stage in the development of this idea. More familiar yet more oblique, it plunges us into a surreal world where giallo is the only code of understanding, eschewing narrative in favour of startling images, symbols and style.
London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts recently hosted a murderous double bill to celebrate the imminent Blu-Ray release of 2009’s postmodern Giallo homage Amer, directed by real world couple Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, both of whom were on hand to provide an insightful Q&A session after the screening, alongside a rare projection of the 1982 …