The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

I love Giallo stuff and when there's a movie that pays tribute or respect to the genre, I'd give it a go. So with this one, seeing a really cool cover of the DVD and being French and all, hey off course :) I like the idea of a missing lover story and I really like the stylized detailed, closed up shots and sounds of many of the scenes. BUT I find it a bit much. I feel that with Giallo, being psychedelic doesn't mean,psychedelic shots of every scenes, this movie has an amazing / best art nouveau back drop that it self already gives a certain persona. I find my self looking the other way just every now and then to rest my eyes also press the ff button just because my brain is telling me " yes I got it, got the idea...next ". However I still recommend it to you, because it has a very good story and all this stuff I'm writing about is worth to look at. But for me.....a bit over done

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.

Certainly in the spirit of giallo but with the soul of Kafka. No simple narrative flow, not even a regular narrative structure, this visual and aural treat is not the simplest of watches. Always beautiful with continuous references to stained glass, art nouveau, eyes, knives and bared and bleeding flesh, the music and effects are also alluring, evocative and disturbing. A man returns from a business trip to find he cannot find his wife ( Edwige, nudge nudge aficionados! ) and that's about it, unless you count the wondrous building in which the film takes place or the spaces behind the walls. The directing duo are clearly fascinated by the Italian genre films of the 60s and early 70s and deliver up the most sumptuous offering, its just that, not unreasonably, they are less interested in the story lines but more in the more primal elements that go into even the lesser giallo. They love the colours, the sounds, the wide eyed screams and the trickling blood. The confused participants who know not whether they are mad or even dead, cannot help but draw us in to this manic mayhem and those of us who, similarly enjoy this craziness, can only applaud and breathe a sigh of relief we got out alive.

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.

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