The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears
Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get a lot of things right in their giallo reconstructions: the colors, the glove and switchblade preferences, crystals, vice, diaries, and the character nod of the name “Edwige” (you talk about scream queens, French actress Edwige Fenech stripped nude for her killer for about 40 films in a decade).
Where the directors stumble is in telling a story. In Amer, and now The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, the story is a headache, a shattered candy dish of visual and aural pleasures.
Weaving in and out of consciousness and reality and dreams it seems like everything means something in Your Body’s Tears: knife wounds to the center of the brain are extremely vaginal, the “body’s tears” seems to be another horror dalliance on the fear of menstruation, etc. The story is a pretty simple set up, that only makes sense in the actual set-up: a man comes home from working abroad a few days, his wife is disappeared, but the door is locked via a chain on the inside. So if she left, it wasn’t through the front door. Did she leave him? Was she snatched? Is her body in the apartment?
Cattet and Forzani build (slightly) on Amer. Amer announced them as filmmakers who could deftly reconstruct the giallo scheme: bright reds, greens, prism fractions, a bouncy but spooky score (for Colour, the filmmakers have again repurposed previous musical tracks by Ennino Morricone and Bruno Nicolai to a great degree, it feels like they were made for this film). For Colour they even use stop photography and different frame rates to give us an extra voyeur ickiness, and perhaps an added nod to Jans Svankmajer (Alice, Little Otik), that great stop motion explorer of women’s fears (menstruation, and that thing that happens when a period is missed: a baby is born). They also have a few nice jokes on their own story meandering: when a detective questions the husband, the story veers into a retelling of … something mechanical, orgasmic and torturous. This veer in story lasts for enough time that you think the narrative has now shifted away from the husband, before he asks: “what’s this story got to do with me?”
While that is a funny meta-wink that allows the filmmakers to explore different murderous desires, the whole film could honestly ask: what’s this story got to do with anything we’ve seen?
Cattet and Forzani are in an exciting but maddening class of filmmakers: they are deft with camerawork and mood (the use of sound, particularly scurrying hands on walls, and breathy moans, is magnificent) but they barrage the viewer with symbols and keys without any space to connect anything. To this end, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is like walking into a video art installation in a museum. After viewing half of it, you get it. It repeats but doesn’t actually add to anything before it. When Cattet and Forzani provide a little bit of space for all their clues to sink in, the color of my tears is going to be joy.
