THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS
L’étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps 2013, Strand Releasing, 101m 47s, $32.99 BD-A, $27.99 DVD-1 By Tim Lucas
On your first pass through the second film by Belgian film- making duo Bruno Forzoni & Héléne Cattet (the makers of 2009’s AMER), you are likely to feel alternately baffled, intrigued, overwhelmed, irritated, overstimu- lated, bludgeoned, misled, teased, pleased, lost, and utterly uncom- prehending—but if you are schooled in the ways of Italian thrillers, it is a film that speaks your language; and if you are knowledgeable about the works of Italian director Sergio Martino, the end credits will likely slash a smile across your face, as they did mine—the kind of suddenly en- lightened smile that Malcolm McDowell discovers at the close of Lindsay Anderson’s O LUCKY MAN! (1973) when Anderson slaps him across the face with its script. This Zen slap of the film’s closing moments—triggered by the overdue summoning of “Sabba,” a Bruno Nicolai cue from Martino’s film Tutti i col- ore nel buio [US: THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU!, 1971]— somehow galvanizes all the loose ends that come before, into plea- sure rather than understanding. THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS is a cel- ebration, a tossed salad of light-
ning bolt giallo tropes, images so inculcated with meaning that they import memories of entire films in a flash, if you have been so edu- cated. While watching it for the first time, I quickly understood and took heart in the fact that I was likely its perfect audience (as read- ers of this magazine are likely to
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be) but it was not until its final minutes that I felt with any cer- tainty that the film had worked. When I found it difficult to sleep afterwards and rose early the next morning feeling I had to see it again, without delay, I realized that I’d had the sort of cinematic experience that doesn’t occur very often. Despite its penchant for vi- sual quotation, it is not a slavish recreation of something past and dead, but rather the forging— through the use of images and approaches to image introduced by the likes of Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Sergio Martino—of a style of filmmaking analogous to the Art Nouveau architecture on view throughout it: decorative, in- voluted, not quite of this world. Its fundamental technique under- stands that Bava, Argento and Martino represented, within the framework of Italian horror, a pro- cession of doors that took the viewer on a journey from a classi- cal to a modernist to a post-mod- ernist perspective, with visual style simultaneously ramping up and fracturing at the same time, and it determines to become, and largely succeeds in becoming, the next door in that procession. There is a sense throughout the viewing of being intensely en- gaged with the material, wrestling with it, being taught a new language.
There are many points within STRANGE COLOR when the viewer must decide whether to drop the reins of the story and eject the disc or simply surrender to its hallucinatory bombardment. There is a story, or at least a situ- ation, and just enough informa- tion is imparted along the way to supply us with a fragment of un- derstanding, making the viewer analogous to one of Argento’s protagonists, determined to grasp some present but overlooked, sol- vent piece of information. Before we can ask ourselves “What were
those strange drops of narrative in the midst of all this weird beauty?” the final minutes answer that question, but in such a furtive, veiled manner that Forzoni-Cattet seem to assert that understanding is the cheapest of any film’s plea- sures, that it is better not to know—to pause, rewind, obsess. Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange), a grizzled, middle-aged telecom- munications executive, returns home from a business trip to Frankfurt (should it not have been Freiberg?) to find his wife Edwige missing from their apartment in a fabulously ornate Art Nouveau building, though its door was left bolted from the inside. Venturing outside in pursuit of a clue, he gets locked out and seeks re-en- try by hitting the buzzers of his neighbors (humorously, when he hits his own buzzer, we hear the non-diegetic music played earlier as he was straightening his apart- ment), which leads to encounters with other women—Cherie, an eld- erly woman who lives in the shad- ows of her own apartment, and a nude woman named Barbara met on the roof of the building, both of whom yield satellite stories to his main narrative. Without re- membering that he contacted the police, Dan receives a visit from a detective, Inspector Vincentelli, who reminisces at length about an earlier, similar reported disappear- ance in the same building, in which he discovered that “it wasn’t she who disappeared; it was [the husband] who was afraid of dis- appearing.” To some extent, Dan does commence to disappear as the metaphysics of his wife’s van- ishing and related gossip over- whelm him. The old woman upstairs tells him a story about how her late husband went insane after finding his way behind the walls and above the ceiling of their apartment; Vincentelli’s story, con- cerning a lady in red, becomes entangled with Dan’s reality when
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