The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is a tribute to Italian Giallo slasher films of the 60s and 70s. The film begins with a man returning to his apartment after he has been away on business for two weeks, only to find that his wife is missing. The man then tries to find his wife. He searches through her stuff calls, the police, and visits a mysterious lady up on the seventh floor of his building. But things take a turn for the worse when he discovers something that has mysteriously appeared in his apartment. The film then becomes a disjointed serious of dream sequences and flashbacks that become increasingly hard to follow.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is second film by the Italian horror duo, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Frozani. And let me just say that these two know what they're doing, the film is very well crafted, the blocking and camera work in this is some of the freshest I've seen in any film from the past few years. The cinematography (shot by Manuel Dacosse) is fantastic. The film is vibrantly colorful, has flawless lighting, and does a great job of getting you up close and personal with the characters in the film. The sound design is also insanely good. There's little dialogue in the film, (we get most of the information about the characters through what we see.) but the void the absence of dialogue has made is filled with some of the most detailed and complex sound design I've heard in a horror film.

But where The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears succeeds in style, it fails in story. With all of its jumping around, cryptic storytelling, and dream sequences it becomes nearly impossible to follow, (at least towards the end.) and thus the film fails to engage its audience. The story in itself wasn't that great to start with, and they never really add anything onto it, if anything they take away from where the story started by making it so confusing and to make it worse they don't do much to try and make you follow their film. Their are aspects of the story that are really good, (like the back story of the lady on the seventh floor.) but on a whole the story is alright at best, and a muddled mess at worst.

While not bad a bad film, The Strange Color of Your Bodies Tears could have been much better than it actually was. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Frozani both definitely have talent, they just need to work on focusing in on a single theme or story, and making it coherent. If they are able to do these two things the film they make will almost definitely be a masterpiece. But for now I'm satisfied with The Strange Color of Your Bodies Tears.

5.9

At first I couldn't really explain why I didn't like this film. After all, the foyer and staircase in the building are the kind of atmospheric luxury one expects in a giallo or apartment horror, and the old lady upstairs reminded me a bit of The Sentinel, one of my favorite films ever.

I think it's the main guy. I don't like him. Not that I like every horror protagonist or "point of view" killer in giallo, but I couldn't empathize or feel horror, I just felt a kind of worldly distaste. The kind of distaste I feel for Wall Street moguls, tax accountants, and Republicans. Not the kind of supernatural fascination or psychological curiosity one might have in the horror/thriller genres.

In fact nothing about this felt haunted to me. There was no pang of nostalgia, no whisper of ghosts (real or imagined), no monstrous memories sparked, no sleeping dogs refused to lie. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is more of surreal modern nightmare centering about a rich white man. His dream felt incoherent in a bad way, it did not compel me to pay attention, I could barely get through this. But I have to give it 6 stars for the incredible beauty of particular scenes.

One of the few films that made me nervous with it's chaotic plot that leads to nonsense. I can say that the beginning of the action was in place, the shots were unusual, but still unique and well illustrated.

Many parts of the film are accompanied by intense music, which in some parts may be superfluous, at least with the power with which it is expressed. The subjective impression is as if you took a narcotic and as if you were straight, twisted at the same time.

The film served as an inspiration to Marilyn Manson for two music videos and I can say that he made a great whole, and 4 obvious reasons - the videos were much shorter than the film.

From another point of view, we can call this film an extravagant masterpiece in which a lot of effort has been invested, but through the continuation of the film, that same effort falls into the water.

I attended the Belgian premiere of 'L'Étrange Couleur des Larmes de ton Corps' at Film Fest Gent 2013 after reading that the film would be a homage to the giallo genre and therefore would contain music by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai (in my opinion the two best film composers there are). The only giallo I have seen until now is 'Suspiria', though I'm familiar with the names of some of the directors and actresses and also some of the titles through the work of Morricone and Nicolai. I undoubtedly missed a lot of references, but of course I understood that the name of Dan's wife, Edwige, was no coincidence :)

I was ready to immerse myself in a pure genre film, but it was still quite a challenging trip. On the plus side, the film is beautifully shot, with great use of extremely vivid colours and interior (Dan's breathtaking house by - I assume - Horta) and exterior locations (the Law Courts of Brussels). Much thought has also been put into the editing, the sound design and the choice of wonderful Italian film music. On a technical/aesthetic level, this movie is a triumph.

On the downside, the script is deliberately disorienting, which is even reinforced by most of the shots being exhausting close-ups. Some sequences/parts of the story are too short (the bearded man taking pictures of beautiful women, which is never explained), while others last too long (the sequence where Dan wakes up 20 times thanks to an incredibly irritating door bell that rings about 100 times). Although the story is thin, it's often confusing and hard to follow and the film's conclusion is rather unsatisfying.

All in all, this clearly is more of an art film than a narrative film, so while this means that it's beautiful to look at from start to finish, the story leaves much too be desired.

Being visually stunning this movie is great essentially for its amazing cinematography and the way the camera is used.

Detailed and wonderful plans, vivid colors, amazing sets inside Art Deco buildings; it all have an astonishing visual effect.

The plot is mysterious and complex.

It's all about a murderer that is killing people inside their houses, but without breaking anything or leave any clue. But who is this murder anyway?

It's one of those movies you can't figure out the entire plot at the first sight! At least I didn't!

But I was amazed with the strange colors of this film!