LeftLion Review: The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears



The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013) 
Dir. Bruno Forzani & Helene Cattet 


 Broadway Cinema's Mayhem Film Festival was in full swing this weekend, showing a vast variety of sub-genres and nationalities. The first film to shown on the Friday evening was the giallo-influenced French horror The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears from creative duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Let it be said that attempting to make cohesive narrative sense out of such a film will be a fruitless, frustrating task for many. A psychedelic mishmash of the grotesque and the ornamental, the film appears to involve the disappearance of a businessman's wife, and his search for her through the apartment building where they live. This is a fairly arbitrary framework for utter aural and visual insanity, the locus of which is a havoc-wreaking, shape-shifting woman with terrifying sexual prowess and a propensity for straight razors.
Much of the film takes place in the art nouveau interior of the building they occupy. Its turn of the century architecture, painted glass, and ornately patterned wallpapers are seemingly infused with malice and witchery. A particular ‘beneath the wallpaper’ sequence is claustrophobically terrifying; the setting truly becomes a suffocating, maddening nightmare space. The building itself doubles back on itself deceivingly. Any traditional filmic conception of visual space, ellipsis of time, or dream sequences must be forgotten.
The remarkable, avant-garde sound design is almost sensually preoccupied with the sounds of sinew and flesh splitting under blades, vinyl sliding against skin, zips unzipping, glass breaking, sighs, screams, and moans; a cacophony of teeth-clenching noise. There is a fixation on eyes, with parallelism between pupils dilating and camera lenses focusing; the act of looking is deceptive and horrifying. Obsessive visual motifs litter the film; long hair, black, tentacle-like tendrils of it, shown repetitively as well as muscles straining, veins, sutures, leather, breasts, blades, and red vinyl.  As these motifs repeat and meld into one another, they form a sort of internal logic, a pattern singularly unique to the film.
Post-giallo, Post-Godard, Strange Colour pushes the boundaries of radical non-narrative form, welcoming the beautifully rendered chaos of pure sensory experience. 
  


 

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