The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps

French writing/directing team Hélène Cattet’s and Bruno Forzani’s The Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears is an homage to the Italian giallo horror cinema of directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento.  The plot revolves around Dan (Klaus Tange) who returns home to his apartment to find his wife has disappeared. With no help from his neighbors, his landlord, or the police, Dan's search for answers leads him on a nightmarish, psychosexual journey where the difference between reality and dream gets blurred beyond all comprehension. The film fails to create a sense of either mystery or horror, and lacks the perversely inviting quality of the best giallo films. Cattet and Forzani weave a tapestry of sound and image that adds up to little. They fashion a mere tribute to (or a one-upping of) a film form rather than a picture that stands on its own.  Just as Italian gladiator films are referred to as “sword and sandal pictures” I’ve often thought giallo films should be called “knife and nipple movies” because of their adolescent preoccupation with naked ladies and bloody violence. The Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears manifests my nickname in one of its images that is repeated so many times it starts to feel like a joke.

When I was studying film in the late ‘80s / early ‘90s, before the adoption of digital technology, I often mocked experimental video art as nothing but close-ups of eyes and mouths (as macro-lens photography was one of the few things that looked cool in the low-rez formats of the day). But a camera’s ability to photograph in extreme detail various parts of the human body (or the shiny edges of sharp metal instruments) can only go so far, no matter how these images are edited together. The transition to high definition has improved video art but it has also transferred some of that medium’s visual obsessions to feature films like this one. The dreaded split-screen, another tiresome hallmark of both video art and ‘70s cinema, also crops up in The Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears.

The giallo films of the ‘70s and ‘80s that effectively creep out audiences do so because their directors create a palpable spooky atmosphere. But in this film, everything in is shot in extreme close-up, which robs us of any sense of place, setting, or physical ambiance. This film doesn’t only take place in the main character’s mind; it also unfolds in his apartment building--which is central to the mystery. But this building never emerges as a character, and we never get a true understanding of its geography and therefore are never successfully creeped out by it.  I say skip The Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears, and instead rent a good Argento film like Suspiria or Phenomena. Or, better yet, go see one of Roman Polanski's masterful “evil apartment pictures”: Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, or The Tenant.