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

From http://twitchfilm.com/assets/2013/07/StrtangeColorPoster-1.jpg

Dirs. Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet

As a side note, the viewing of the second feature length film of the directors of Amer (2009) does come with a strange anecdote of going to see it. There were tests being run just before a 3.20pm screening, and after some delay, the first images on the cinema screen were mute clip from The Truman Show (1998). If Jim Carrey had actually been in an avant garde psychodrama cribbing from the texts of giallo films from Italy, my head would've exploded. I have no grief with said cinema just to let the reader know. The screening was late but all the trailers usually played in front of films were skipped, and the film was presented to its best as a visual and audio barrage, so I have nothing to concern myself with. It's just that odd moment is very memorable.

It's befitting the type of film The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears is that this kind of breaking up of cinematic conventions was done by accident before the film actually started. Done completely sincerely, it nonetheless takes the conventions of the giallo, a murder mystery story, and inverses them. Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange) arrives back in Belgium from his work abroad, only to find his wife Edwige (Ursula Bedena) is nowhere to be found. The building complex they are living in is a maze of hidden secrets and perplexing circumstances surrounding the environment. The fellow occupants have their own hidden sides, and nothing is what it seems. Joined by Detective Vincentelli (also played by Klaus Tange), reality becomes less and less tangible as the walls hide older ones, a killer is clearly within the building, and the circumstance are so severe Kirstensen even becomes his own killer, victim and witness at the same time one restless night. It is not a good comparison to say this is close to an original giallo. They could be campy, schlocky and significantly different even when they were stylish and artistic. For all their abstract moments, even Dario Argento's, they had a simple narrative that was followed closely. The Strange Colours... has a narrative, unlike Amer's three segments, but is likely going to be the more difficult of the two for people because it purposely goes away from what is easily understandable, using symbolism and outright surrealism for plot points. The film is very unconventional on purpose, the experimental style of the directors made clearly apparent again like in their previous work rather than for them to be making a throwback film. Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball (1975) this is not, a trashy and wonky Italian pulp film, but violently nasty, pulsating with sex and weird imagery, as much Art with a capital A and a sensority experience.

From https://static-secure.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/10/1397138290671/Aping-Bu-uel-a-scene-from-010.jpg

It feels right on point that critic Anton Bitel, in Sight and Sound magazine reviewing the fillm, suggested this was a treatise on the mind of a psychologically damaged man, Kristensen's possibly. When the Detective and the protagonist are played by the same person, it immediately suggests, to paraphrase a title of Video Nasty film, that this is nightmares of a damaged brain we're seeing. Amer, despite its three separate pieces that made its whole, had an obvious connective tissue - the growth of a girl into a woman, puberty and sexuality inbetween - while The Strange Colours... jumps from its narrative tracks to follow the mental environments of its characters. This is furthered by the trademark style of the directors, an exceptional and total cinematic flourish. It's not just the striking use of colours. Or the unconventional use of ordinary objects. It's the obsession with the smallest of details, amplifying them greatly. Rarely in films do you get the sound of leather stretched. As the sole other person in the theatre with me said, afterwards, there was an extensive use of added sound effects. Concerning one with all the aspects of a film - visuals, sound, editing and so forth - with as equal care never feels apparent in quite a lot of cinema when you many movies. Far from giving attention to itself with this, pushing you away from engaging in the film, it is as immersive as a dream, no matter how abstract the film around is, all interconnecting in a way perceived to make rational sense. Instead of becoming impatient in wanting a standard A-to-B narrative, which is a danger when viewing a work like this, this has its images and scenes connect together by themselves in a way that explains what is going on that you have to be willing to follow on their own accord.

When the detective has his own flashback to previous assignment, involving voyeurism and vengeance with red wrapped "sweets" and rings as claws, that seems to have no connection to what is originally taking place, it's clear it's not as random as Kristensen points it out to be in being mentioned as the film goes along. It's just one part of a clearer connected tissue of moods and ideas. The anxieties and lusts of a male where his wife interchanges with many other women, sex and death juxtaposed and combined as the apartment complex becomes a host of a single mind than a building. Turning an all changing entity of photo-optic tricks in the opening credits, that can house the most sadomasochistic acts, including an uncomfortable situation with glass, to the curiosity of a young boy. Never has the goal that Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali had in mind with Un Chien Andalou (1929) been a clear reference point for a film that is also indebted to a specific area of cult genre cinema, but it's the case with The Strange Tears..., especially the notion of removing anything that had an obvious explanation but using a well known narrative structure to construct a film around this irrational material. Everything has a purpose or is designed to juxtapose in unconventional ways. It becomes very obvious what has happened to Edwige, but the reason why it has happened, and the individual involved, who may be connected to the disappearance of an older man years before, as seen in someone else's flashback, is left a mystery. And it becomes more and more obvious as the film becomes more unconventional that the individual responsible is not necessarily a mere killer, and that something more complicated is going on. When a box of toys suddenly appear, with spiked wheels and erotic imagery amongst them, or a chapter on the desires of a woman, likely Edwige's, plays out involving a bowler hat, stop motion straight from Jan Svankmajer, and an inspired scenario taking place onscreen which uproots conventions of a chase sequence from giallo or slasher films. Even the title, a beautiful one, turns out to be a very obvious reference to something the viewer sees in the end but also hides so many potential signifiers within it, particularly with the amount of wounds and injuries that are inflicted to the human body. The previously mentioned scene of Kristensen literally being duplicated and taking on multiple roles against himself, harming himself, eventually, long after the film ended, becomes the obvious sign of the hidden paranoia of his that becomes more obvious as the other scenes play out.

From http://diaboliquemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/STRANGE-COLOURS-MIDLINE.jpg

It's not that rare to see experimental artists use pop culture that is seen as un-progressive and below high culture for a source of inspiration. Actually, its more common than you'd think. In most cases it's the reasons the material were criticised for that are the aspects latched onto by the artists to replicate in their work, Andy Warhol the obvious example. There is definitely a fan vibe to this film when the protagonist, part of an intercontinental telecommunications company, has so many main themes from Italian giallo on vinyl and plays them at convenient moments, the film littered with tracks taken from the original inspiration and providing the theme of Killer Nun (1978) an expecting resurrection as a tense and inspired ditty that gets into your head. And The Strange Colours... inherited the lurid side of the giallo - the nudity, the sexuality, and the linking of death and said sexuality together that'll be shocking for some viewers. A razor blade and a woman's anatomy, an image repeated multiple times, is something that you see at the beginning of the film and lets you in on what to expect for the rest of the running time. I admit I was concerned the film was going to get silly or undermine itself with questionable content, especially from a scene early on where a woman is completed naked on a balcony of the apartment complex for no discernible reason. But when, around then, it seemed to progress dangerously close to tasteless, fitting as it references giallo, not a good thing when it's trying to be a serious avant-garde film too, the equal opportunities attitude to both genders in what happens takes place and a much more complicated tone is revealed by the halfway point that prevents it from being mere ultraviolent softcore. Its a work of pure style, I confess that, but its a gem of this because it uses its style to create a tone of fear linking with anxieties of sexuality and violence that gives a depth to the proceedings. Using the ability of dream logic to transform moods into sensations that are more than enough to have a profound effect on you. The works that take their influence from "disreputable" objects tend not to stick with the structures and meanings of the originals, and transport them into a new context. As Kristensen becomes more entangled within a situation that becomes more of a cloud over him for the viewer watching the film, the sense of reality being altered that is apparent in giallo, where each plot twists changes the rules of how everything works, is here as well but with a significant difference. Each piece of information in a giallo, far from a breadcrumb to get one home, is a further complication in these films, but there's a conventional narrative surrounding them nonetheless which is not found here. Dropping the conventional narrative, this is no longer a stylish pulp journey for the sake of twists and turns that a giallo usually is, but concentrates itself, using the sub-genre's style, on the sensation of tension and sensuality. While Amer was about female sexuality, this is clearly about male sexuality. Amer had danger, death and fetishism, but this feels more chaotic, nastier and paranoid in tone to the earlier film. They mirror each other, but this one feels the more intentionally horrific once it gets to its ending, all stemming from a complete lack of understanding in femininity once you get what its title originally means. You could argue the reason why Amer ended as it does is explained in this film like a metaphorical prequel, although rewatching Amer is a must for me now.

After the viewing, when the lights came up after the end credits finished, I was the sole person in the screening room, the other individual who watched the film having already left as (presumably) the end credits rolled, creating a sense of having been dropped back into real life suddenly. It was startling. With its blasts of sound, heavy percussion based music cribbed from the original inspirations, visual manipulations and moments of editing that felt like a knife piercing flesh, it felt like the sensual overload I went into the screening hoping it would be, having left me disorientated for a long while after the viewing. The lights of the nearby bathroom were a heady, sickly yellow of artificial lighting, a cramped claustrophobic toilet cubicle with a grill behind you when you sit down. What's behind the grill, something I actually asked myself jokingly but with curiosity. Complete blackness. Maybe behind it, what was a respectable art cinema with modern architecture hid a secret or two like is found in the film when a wall is broken down. While The Strange Colours of Your Body's Tears doesn't provide intellectual meat to leave on, its a film that causes you to look and listen carefully around you when you leave the cinema and step back into the real world, causing one to see it through senses and emotions. Everything pulsated when I got on the train for the long way trip home, even though it was a bright English afternoon and no one was being killed by someone in leather gloves nearby like an Argento film. Probably the reason giallo was the object of obsession for the directors Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet is that it's the sub-genre where style and what is seen, felt and heard was so extravagant and obsessed over, from the music to the colours. And a story of murder and sex is always about sensation too even if it's pure fantasy. What's truly cinematic is when you can feel a film, not just look at pretty pictures on a screen. With a success rate of two out of two feature films, a great segment in the wildly varying (but underrated) The ABCs of Death (2012) and short features, the duo behind this are few of the only individuals who take reference from the history of cult cinema seriously and create results that actually have virtue to it. Not through indulgence, sarcasm, or merely presuming to replicate the older films, but by turning it into their own voice even if its divisive and for only a few. It's going to feel like hell for me waiting for their next film now. Even a short would suffice!

From http://www.critic.de/images/the-strange-colour-of-your-bodys-tears-03-The_S.jpg