An example of the non-stop delirious imagery to be found
in Héléne Cattet & Bruno Forzani’s THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS, a challenging celebration of 1970s giallo cinema.
he later notices Barbara ascend- ing to her #7 apartment dressed in red and follows her to a one- night stand, involving hallucino- genics, broken glass and a blood fetish—as in Martino’s Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (aka BLADE OF THE RIPPER), and further revelations of danger- ous spectres that live within the walls, like phantoms out of the writings of Edogawa Rampo. Waking from these three tangents three times, at one point even wit- nessing his own awakening from a vantage behind his bedroom wall, Dan is tagged as a suspect by Vincentelli and as a bad ten- ant by his grumpy landlord, pass- ing on complaints about his annoying behavior from the other tenants. When Dan wakes in the company of his wife’s severed head, we’re not sure if this is just another bad dream, something that he’s done, or something that the gremlins in the walls have caused. To pose a question once
asked by Roger Corman’s Poe films, “Is the house the monster?”
Further obfuscating these ques- tions is the fact that Dan some- what resembles Vincentelli, and at no point do they share the screen or make physical contact; like- wise, Edwige is never depicted in present tense, yet she shares physical characteristics with Bar- bara and Cherie, and the fatal dag- ger wounds in various women’s heads in stories told throughout the film foreshadow a key shape resid- ing within a traumatic encounter from Dan’s childhood.
When the film’s title is reprised onscreen at the end, it is a differ- ent title—L’étrange douleur des larmes de ton corps (“The Strange Pain of Your Body’s Tears”)—which raises the question of whether this film is meant to embody more than a single nar- rative, or if we, ourselves, have undergone a similar metamorpho- sis to Dan. Indeed, STRANGE COLOR is an anthology film of
sorts, its stories taking place in (or concerning events within) the same building over a period of time, with the stories arranged not in succession but rather in scat- tered, fragmented layers. The scattering and layering plays Robbe-Grilletian tricks of empha- sis and de-emphasis with the story content, seriously mooting impor- tant details like the identity (or is it just the most probable identity?) of the killer, and revisiting the con- tent of Edwige’s diary at a later point prior to anything being written in it, which raises the question of whether
this is a
chronologic cheat or a narrative slippage. In addition to the visual track knocking one perpetually off- balance, the film’s soundtrack is a staggering patchwork of lush
soundtrack cues from other gialli by the likes of Morricone and Nicolai and some of the most grat- ing and obnoxious sound effects imaginable, forging a pattern of punishment and reward. When
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