The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani 2013 Belgium
Starring: Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener, Birgit Yew, Hans de Munter, Lolita Oosterlynck
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears is a hard film to describe. Words that seem fitting and appropriate in one moment fade and disappear within minutes as proceedings flip over and over again. Wild certainly comes to mind as does creative as, in fact, does batshit insane but about the closest I can get is to call it a psychedelic, psychosexual murder mystery/sensory assault although don't quote me on that. In (several) unexpected turns the camera twists, pirouettes, cascades, reverses its images, destroys them and makes them sinister with filters, takes on the stimuli of its fractured protagonist as it alternates between gliding and attacking the halls of its art nouveau setting, a maze-like building crammed with stained glass peacocks and painted ceilings that allow one character, when attempting to drill through the ceiling into the attic above, to trepan a tableaux. The sound meanwhile ranges from creepy retro jazz to white noise to the crackle of skin tightening moments before it's slashed open. At various points the film bears the stamps of Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, David Lynch and even Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé even if the finished product is nothing like the back catalogues of any of them. More than anything though it calls to mind the Italian horror genre giallo in its violence, fetishism and mystery, its garish colours and slight artificiality but particularly its borrowing of the name Edwige for its central (if absent) female lead from Edwige Fenech, the star of many works of the field (and it can't be a coincidence that three of those films are Sergio Martino's The Strange Case Of Mrs Wardh & All The Colours Of The Dark and Giuliano Carnimeo's What Are Those Strange Drops Of Blood Doing On Jennifer's Body?). And of course there's avid reference to other greats of cinema; to Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance in its blurring of the identities of two apparently different but paradoxically similar men, to Dario Argento's Suspiria and Georges Franju's Eyes Without A Face in its images of eyes peering through small holes that act as their only entry to other worlds, to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining in its unsolvable riddles within a labyrinthine, possibly malevolent structure, to Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris in its rise up the innards of a allegorical building into invisible darkness and even to William Friedkin's The Exorcist in its invasion of human bodies and its use of a crucifix for purposes quite beyond the intended function. If its influences are clear however its narrative is more elusive. It concerns Dan who, returning home from a business trip, finds his flat locked from the inside and his wife missing and drifts into a delirious search for her, aided by a detective (played by the same actor Klaus Tange), his belligerent landlord and a shadowy old lady who lives on another floor, sort of resembles a film noir Miss Havisham and claims her husband disappeared while searching the edifice for concealed intruders leaving behind only a single drop of blood. But there's another man, this one with a beard, a camera and an unseen supervisor. He appears to live within the walls but continually enters the assortment of apartments silently and often without being detected although at one point during an attempt to touch and film a sleeping woman with his smartphone he is hilariously betrayed by an incoming call. The enigma doesn't stop there though even extending to the title with its ambiguous 'tears' - readable as both the tears we cry and the tears in flesh contained within although the original title makes it clearer (larmes refers exclusively to lachrymal secretions) - and its definite use of colour suggestive of blood, come and menstruation. Cattet and Forzani's intent is likewise difficult to pin down and there are countless ways to read the sprawling plot, the most coherent one (at least to me) being that the story is a purely solipsistic exercise, a dream that Dan's skewered brain creates while sleeping on the plane in the film's opening scene, the scar on his forehead representing the wounds that are later made with a dagger, his chaotic state of mind corresponding to his chaotic home and the moments when he assaults a doppelganger, watches himself commit suicide then enters and tries to escape from a false body symbolising suppressed feelings, maybe, like The Shining's Jack Torrance (as I see him at least), attempting to help himself by inventing a sprawling and not entirely convincing reason why his wife abandoned him. But I may be wrong. Regardless I'm still not sure of what I think of it, the film isn't fully realised and can at times be confusing but it's also monumentally stylish, fresh and even stranger than its title insinuates. I found it enjoyable and immensely frustrating, playful and fiendishly intelligent but at least partially impenetrable. It made me grin and grimace, it made me nauseous. You may love it, you may hate it - I've heard both words used - but somehow I doubt you'll regret it.
