Let The Corpses Tan

Pin Tan Alley

Let The Corpses Tan
(aka Laissez bronzer les cadavres)
France/Belgium 2017
Directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani
Kino Lorber  Blu Ray Zone A

I’ve waited too long to order a US edition of Let The Corpses Tan. I wasn’t able to get to go to the London Film Festival screening of this a few years ago but, since I assumed that a new film by husband and wife team Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is akin in audience excitement to waiting for another Star Wars movie in the 1970s, I just figured it would get some kind of hugely marketed cinema release over here. Nope... not even a DVD or Blu Ray, let alone a nationwide cinematic release.

I’m further puzzled about this after viewing it because, like their other two feature films... Amer (reviewed by me here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here)... this one is an absolute masterpiece of the art of film. No quibbling here, it’s a work of two genius directors at the absolute top of their game. Which, frankly, is what I’d expect from these two even on their worst day.

The film is based on a novel I’ve not read by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid and I’m assuming the simplistic story of a gold bar heist gone wrong when various parties, including the police, turn up at the gang’s ‘safe house’ a little after the robbery shown here was picked deliberately by the two auteur directors so they can layer it and infuse with their own artistic vision. The film then becomes one long gunfight referencing flashbacks/forwards (depending on your point of view I suppose), divided loyalties, art mixed with light BDSM elements and the usual potent and heady concoction of brightly lit, gialloesque visual syntax filtered through a surrealistic prism... which is not surprising when these two filmmakers are at the helm. This is what cinema is all about and, right from the opening moments through to the last shot, it’s just one brilliant sequence after another pushed forcibly through your retinas and gouging through your cerebral cortex like an unstoppable freight train.

The cast are fascinating too, with Stéphane Ferrara playing a typical ‘hard but fair’ gang leader and a brilliant turn from the always watchable Elina Löwensohn, who I haven’t seen in a movie for a while and who plays against type here as some kind of artist/dominatrix/masochist called Madame Luce, who owns the property in which the gang are holed up. Big shout out to whoever the person playing the often naked and younger ‘dream flashback’ of her too... she’s especially good tied to a cross and when she’s wearing a different hat well... she certainly puts the ‘gold’ into golden showers, quite literally as the directors seem to have a fetish for imagery involving gold powdered paint, wet gold paint and also as a stand in at one moment for... yeah, I think I’ve waded into that one enough here but I now, having seen the film, am more aware of just what is going on with the Blu Ray and DVD cover, that’s for sure.

A simple story is good, of course because, if you know the work of these two splendid film-makers, you’ll know that every single moment is magnified and expanded in terms of visual exploration and, asides from the immensely controlled frame designs and meticulous camera movement combined with rapid fire, percussive editing in places, there is also an element of the canvass which is about splitting up layers of time and presenting it with deviations from linearity including repeat moments from different points of view which might well perplex viewers if a more complex plot line was also involved. Like a Godard movie, the form and passage of the media telling the tale is as important... actually probably more important... than the story itself and the film calls attention to that constantly.

And there’s some really great stuff in this one, with a few of my personal favourites of sheer celluloid* delight highlighted here to whet your appetite.

Some great stuff where characters are shooting holes through Madame Luce’s latest canvass painting and we see those three characters, each taking up one of the blank holes from a view behind the canvass. This scene concludes (after cutting around to other strands and places) with Luce burning a hole on the canvass with one of her cigars as we cut to the reverse shot of the cigar coming through the back of the canvass as a big circle which then transitions to the circle of an egg cooking and then to the rather hard to decode circle of the moon with ants crawling all over it. It’s only much later in the film it is made apparent to the audience that this is a mirror on the ground reflecting the moon.

One sequence which really made me sit up is of Löwensohn and Ferrari both seated at opposite ends of a long table. A guy is sitting with his back to us in silhouette in the centre of the table and the reason for this is to make the mechanics of the next series of shots possible. So we have Löwensohn and her half of the table left of screen. She says something and the camera rushes over to Ferrari screen right... and so on back and forth to each other. However, each time the camera gets to the other person, they have zoomed in much closer to the foreground of the shot. By the time only half of Löwensohn’s face in profile is in shot, we finally get a shot where the next cut brings both of their faces in close up facing each other from each side of the screen, completely mocking the length of the table we have seen in the earlier shots. For a few seconds I was at a loss to know how they managed to zoom in so accurately on each person as the camera whizzed along until I realised I was watching a travelling matte shot each time, with the silhouette of the guy sitting in the centre of the table used as a mask to transition each section of the two shots being used for each camera movement. I think this is the only time I’ve seen this done but please let me know in the comments section if there are any other movies where this happens.

I also love how some of the action at the start goes into posterised, single colour washes of various characters (each with heir own different colour) like an old 1960s spaghetti western opening title sequence, before going into their own title sequence in a similar style. The needle drop style soundtrack features various iconic, found and reused score cuts by the likes of Morricone, Cipriani and Fidencio etc... as is these directors’ usual MO. This, of course, helps greatly to propel the nostalgic element of the opening titles. It's a little like one of the trailers for Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (aka Twitch Of The Death Nerve) in that respect.

Other delights include the cutting away of a foot kickstarting a motorcycle to edit out the journey by following up with the foot coming off the motorcycle which is now in a different location, a stealth dream sequence where one character is riddled with machine gun hits but instead of killing her they merely obliterate her clothing until she is naked and a beautiful piece of sound design where one of the characters drugs herself and time rewinds for her back to before the start of the film but, when she returns to normal time, the musical soundtrack is playing backwards for those scenes.

Actually, like their previous film, the two directors do tend to chop around with the audience’s perception of time, often referencing the same scene from different perspectives before jumping back before and then after it. Their genius comes from the fact that they do this while still maintaining a through line of coherency to the order of the shots which won’t confuse most people watching (although they do deliberately wrong foot the viewer’s perception on occasion).

All this and a Boris Karloff latex mask like the kinds they used to sell in the 1970s and we have a film which is both referential to the past while absolutely uncovering new territory in terms of advancing what I shouldn’t probably call ‘a narrative’ but will anyway, for the purposes of this review. There are some truly surprising moments and Let The Corpses Tan is, again like Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s previous features, something that I could watch over and over without getting bored for a long time. Absolutely marvellous piece of heavily stylised and beautiful cinema that completely elevates the art form and pushes at its boundaries while simultaneously being completely entertaining. It doesn’t get much better than this.

*Yeah, I know. Watched it by digital means but if celluloid is a term we can still use nostalgically to symbolise the media of cinematic joy then it certainly beings to these two directors.

The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears aka L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps

Tears For Fears

The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears 
aka L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps
2013 Belgium/France/Luxembourg
Directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani
Screening 11th October 2013 at the London Film Festival

Warning: I’m not sure if you could classify any of the stuff I’ll say here as spoilers or not, given the nature of the film in question, but if you want to know absolutely nothing about this then... don’t read I guess. Or better still, go see the movie and then come back and read this.

Unwarning: Having read what I've written, I now realise it's pretty spoiler free... so you must do what you feel is right.

Back at the start of 2011 I wrote a review of the first feature length film by the two directors of The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears. The film was called Amer and it was my “birthday trip” film that year. I absolutely loved it and I knew, even back in early January, that it would take top spot in my Best Movies of 2011 listing. When I saw that the same two writer/directors’ follow up film was playing at this years London Film Festival, I knew it would have to be one of the three hot tickets I wanted to grab.

Unfortunately, because of various problems with the BFI website on the day that advanced LFF tickets went on sale to members, I only managed to get two of the tickets I wanted, the third one selling out before the end of the day (and before I could make arrangements for another purchase route... thanks for all your help Jake, or I wouldn't have got any!). However, at least one of the two tickets I got was for this one and thank goodness for that.

Last night I went to the Vue cinema in London. It used to be the Warners but my understanding is that it had a terrible rep as the Warners so it got rebranded (is this right?). Anyway, the Vue is one of the cinemas hosting this year’s London Film Festival and, I have to say, at one point I would have called it one of the shabbiest screens in London... except, nowadays the majority of the good screens in London are no longer with us so... I’ll just say it's one among others and leave it at that.

When I got there, I had a good omen of things to come because they had the poster for this movie outside Screen 5 where it was playing. It was an obvious rip off, or homage if you prefer, of the graphic poster design of Alphonse Mucha, one of my favourite “art dudes”. And, of course, it’s a really beautiful poster. Absolutely gorgeous. So glad they used this.

Before the film screened the two directors were introduced: a very cool and charming Bruno Forzani and his groovy partner in crime, Hélène Cattet, bubbly, vivacious and pregnant with their child. They came back for a round of Q & A afterwards which, despite the slight language barrier, was extremely informative and also proved to me, without a shadow of a doubt, that these two artists would be great people to hang around and talk film with in a wine bar or some such establishment. Very nice people.

And then I got to finally see the film I’d been looking forward to for a while...

Once again, Cattet and Forzani deliver a spectacular treasure of motion picture art that will knock your eyes out (quite literally, perhaps, in one scene). When their first film Amer came out, people compared it to giallo because the film used the stylistic trappings, both visual and aural, of the Italian genre which has had a very strong re-emergence of popularity internationally since the dawn of the DVD era. Last year a film called Berberian Sound Studio came out and that film got heavily promoted as being made in the style of a giallo but.... it wasn’t. The film had very little in common with the genre which it was said to be representing stylistically and I thought that, although the movie was okay, it was very much misrepresented in exactly the opposite way that Amer wasn’t. Berbarian Sound Studio even had a film poster that seemed to deliberately echo the original promotional posters for Dario Argento’s Four Flies On Grey Velvet... which leads to some pretty big expectations and some major disappointment if you’re going to go into that particular film expecting something similar. But Amer, did use the tropes of giallo even while it wasn’t actually a giallo, so much... although a case could certainly be made if you wanted to take some of the things shown on screen as a literal representation of reality... which I don’t think is a good idea with these two directors.

Well, I’m happy to say that The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears continues with this stylistic system of delivery of the images. It very much uses, not just the intense lighting schemes of directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento (yeah, there’s some fantastic red, green, blue filters/tints used and pitched against each other in this movie), but also some “almost but not quite” recreations of scenes of films in this genre (among others). The “secrets of the house” kind of sensibility may ring a bell with fans of the Italian director Dario Argento’s horror film Inferno (the first sequel to Suspiria), whereas the scene where one of the lead protagonists, if this film could be said to have any favoured protagonists or antagonists, is knocking through a wall to another room/realm can’t help but invoke memories of David Hemming’s trajectory of discovery in Argento’s fourth giallo Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso). It’s something these directors like doing and they make their intentions very clear right from the outset when one of the characters, who goes missing at the start of the movie, is called Edwige... after one of the main queens of giallo, Edwige Fenech.

Another similarity is that the film is both incredibly sexy and quite violent... not necessarily gory, although there is very much a suggestion of gore (blood splashed from a vaginal stabbing and fetishised by the camera gaze, for example), but more the kind of violence that you feel, aided by the juxtaposition of some quick cuts (both kinds of cuts... camera and knife) and some very distinctive and in some cases challenging sound design which people like Alan Splet, I’m sure, would approve of.

Which leads me to another main cinematic connection for this film, concerning one of Alan Splet’s most creative collaborators, David Lynch. Like Amer and some of their short films, The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears has a very strong thread of surrealism running through it. It’s very labyrinthine, which Hélène Cattet told us was the intention in the Q & A session at the end, and it takes you on a journey where every possible solution to the “puzzle” of the milieu is answered with another visual/aural question, as opposed to anything reminiscent of closure (although it does come close to closure at one point but I think that was almost a red herring). I think I’ll possibly discover more “ending” in the movie when I’ve viewed it a few more times (on blu ray, as soon as possible please) but for now I couldn’t really, after having seen the film, tell you what it was about.

There are extended sequences of repeat cycles which in some ways echo a famous scene in Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill, reappropriated by David Lynch for the final episode of his Twin Peaks series (I think it even showed up in Berberian Sound Studio too, actually). Although I found this did drag a bit towards the end (which is my only criticism of a near perfect cinematic experience), these scenes are very much a metaphor for the style of storytelling (for want of a better term) involved here... which kind of reveals itself like a series of Russian Matryoshka Dolls which, I’ve just realised as I type those words, were also included as a visual image in the movie. So they’re very clued up about the nature of their own work methinks, these two directors. Which makes for a richer viewing experience for all of us.

And then, of course, there’s the soundtrack.

Not many directors can pull off a cohesive “found” soundtrack. Tarantino, the king of needledrop scores, is pretty good at it. Cattet and Forzani are better. With Tarantino’s films they tend to turn the movies into a bit of a game. Distracting totally from the visuals while your brain tries to remember which film the music originally came from. Although there is very much an element of that here (especially since some of the visual images are so directly referencing other things) the way in which these two use old Italian giallo (and other) scores from the 60s and 70s by the likes of such luminaries as Nino Fidenco, Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone, is just astonishing when coupled, at full blast, with the strength of the visuals and sound design. At one point I forgot I was listening to Bruno Nicolai’s score from All The Colours Of The Dark (a giallo featuring Edwige Fenech, who I mentioned earlier in this review) because I was so immersed in the experience of watching this movie.

And I think that last statement kinda sums up the point I want to make. Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, with only two feature films, are already two of modern cinemas great artisans. Their films are pure cinema, which is a phrase which I know is not popular at the moment. But by pure cinema I mean that they are showing you something you can’t see in real life and are doing so in such a way that the shot design, acting, story structure, sound design and music come together to create a totally immersive cinematic experience. Whether you like the experience is up to your own personal sensibilities and whether thier work strikes a chord within yourself... but certainly they follow in the footsteps of such pioneers of cinema like Georges Méliès and stand head and shoulders with such celluloid masters as Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky and any other major talent from the history of cinema you would care to name.

The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears is two parts Italian giallo, two parts David Lynch and two parts Jan Svankmajer... and if you go in expecting that kind of mix of sensibilities then I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. This film gets a big recommendation from me and will almost certainly be the best first-release film I see this year (or next year, depending on when it gets a cinema release).

I Amer Camera

Amer 2009

France/Belgium Directed by

Hélène Cattet

& Bruno Forzani

This film currently

screening at

UK cinemas

Amer is, simply put,

a wonderful movie.

Go see it.

Oh, okay. You want me to elaborate on that, don’t you? Right, here we go then...

It would seem, perhaps, overstating the obvious to identify that Cattet and Forzani’s Amer uses all the techniques and visual/musical trapping of the brilliant genre of the Italian giallo movie (explicity, those made in the period of the classic gialli of the 1960s and early to mid 70s ). Pretty much everyone who’s seen this movie and who is familiar with the genre (which I wrote a very long article about here) have picked that up.

Of course, the section of the audience who are not “up” on their gialli are not going to recognise that... and so I expect a fair number of the people who are going to be looking at this movie are going to find it very fresh indeed. To us long-in-the-tooth veterans, however, there’s still a certain freshness and pacing to the way in which these stylistic techniques are revitalised and, dare I say it, “adrenalised” which make Amer a movie to be reckoned with. Let’s call it retro-fresh then! ;-)

For starters, though, I should put out a warning to people who like dialogue laden movies or ones which tell a story, to be the sole choice of celluloid food on their menu of film... this movie really doesn’t have much in the way of story and very little dialogue for its 90 minutes. If you want something which is a linear ride from point A to B then you’re in for a disappointment. It is a narrative, linear structure to be fair but... it doesn’t really add up to anything really coherent or resolved without you as an audience bringing your own interpretations to bear and impose quite strongly on the visual evidence presented before your eyes.

I can summarise Amer for you very quickly but it won’t lead to closure or even enlightenment in terms of narrative structure... although, to be fair to this consideration, it does at least have a framework on which to hang a semblance of ideas on... but the essence of Amer is that it’s very much, in some ways, a surrealist movie. Here you go then. Here’s my brief summary...

The film is split into three parts.

Part One tells the story of a little girl running around a spooky and frankly disturbing and scary house as she tries to deal with her mum and dad, a dead body and a female monster presence (presumably one of her grandmothers) who you never really get a proper look at as it pursues her to regain a “magical” charm in the form of a pocket watch with an eyeball on it. At least I think that’s what’s happening. I need to see it again.

Part Two is the girl as an adolescent teenager who goes into the local village with her mother (who is having her hair cut) and there she kicks a teenage boy’s football away before chasing after it and feeling sexual attraction to a gang of bikers as she walks past them... for which her mother slaps her.

Part Three is about the same girl grown to womanhood who returns to the abandoned house, gets freaked out by the taxi driver who brought her there (who may or may not be the boy who got his football kicked) and who may or may not be the guy who is now pursuing her through the house and trying to stab her... although that figure could also be herself chasing herself in her minds eye. Not made my mind up yet... only seen it once (and will watch it many times more in my life I suspect).

Ok... that probably sounds quite weird as a plot summary but, if it does, then I’ve done my job because it will hopefully convey the surreal atmosphere created by the movie.

There’s a lot to look at here and people who are into “movies about movies” (like the perverse pleasures offered by the cinema of extremely referential directors like Quentin Tarantino) will love this movie. It hits all the right spots. The opening section of the three sections which comprise the movie is very similar in mood and tone to master giallo maker Dario Argento’s horror movie Inferno. The whole movie, of course, in its homage to the giallo film is using that highly stylised, extreme colour lighting scheme favoured by both Dario Argento and Mario Bava (who helped Argento out on Inferno) but certainly this opening with it’s “monster” figure in barely glimpsed aggression is very similar to the earlier New York sequences of the afore-mentioned Argento flick.

The first section also wears on it’s sleeve the “eyeball watching” shots that Argento favours in such movies as Tenebre and even alludes in some sequences to those great Italian giallo and spaghetti western title sequences which had posterised, single colour versions of the film’s protagonists moving around the screen against a black background (like one of the original trailers to Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood aka Twitch of the Death Nerve). In fact the whole “giallo-stew” approach sounds like it could fall apart quite easily but the techniques using the age old voyeuristic “something-is-watching-this-unfold-and-it-may-just-be-you” approach combined with very dynamic editing, some of which seems like the fast-cut editing on Hopper’s Easy Rider but with a slightly less intrusive, won’t-pop-you-out-of-the-movie sensibility are very skillfully and assuredly approached by the writer/directors and the whole thing is a complete joy to watch.

What hasn’t been mentioned much, or so it seems to me, is the less than giallo-like ingredients to the movie. The middle section is an impressive and subtly made (if less than subtly conveyed) homage to burgeoning sexual desire which would be less influenced by Italian giallo and more heavily influenced, I would suspect, by British and American movies of the early to late sixties. And the joyous and kinetic explosion of visual and sound editing that is the “chasing after the football sequence” is such an assault on the senses (at least in the cinema) that I heard it already being mockingly parodied by members of the audience on leaving the cinema (it has to be said that of the three people I went to see this with, only one of them liked it a bit while the other two seemed to fairly actively dislike/ridicule it... always a sign of a good movie).

The third part is, again, great for fans of gialli in that it features such iconic images as the black leather gloves, the big bugger of a stabby knife and even at one point, a briefly and deeply redish reference to David Hemmings attacking the plaster wall in Argento’s Profondo Rosso!

And all this done with a brilliant, enhanced sound design which sounds just like the exaggerated sounds you would find in Alan Splet’s wonderful soundscapes for the early movies of David Lynch (so think giallo mixed with Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and this will give you some idea of what to expect).

And then of course, as you inevitably do with many of my reviews, you come to the music... and in Amer it’s quite important. Any doubt in your mind that the directors aren’t consciously employing a “giallo style” to their movie will evaporate as soon as your hear the first notes of the music used in this film. It’s one of those needle drop scores which has been assembled from music from other films and this one quite specifically uses the music from three famous gialli... and what a thrill it was to hear them belting out in really great, crystal clear sound from the speakers in the cinema. More specifically, the music mostly comes from three movies which have a very distinct and visual style... and since their are two very distinct visual approaches to scoring gialli (there is the atonal meets jazz style scoring of films like The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Short Night of the Glass Dolls and there is the Goblin inspired progressive-rock style scoring used in movies like Deep Red, Tenebre and Sleepless), it’s interesting to note that the makers of Amer went with one specific style as opposed to a mixture of the two. Specifically, the three most blatantly used scores in Amer seem to be from (to my tired old ears)... Bruno Nicolai’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale, Ennio Morricone’s The Black Belly of the Tarantula and Selvio Ciprianni’s What Have They Done To Your Daughters? I think there are probably a couple of others in there but certainly those ones are fairly prominent. The musical selections are also very sparsely spotted so they are certainly quite stand out, in that they’re not buried in the usual wall-to-wall musical overkill which a lot of modern movies are burdened with.

All in all, then, I can unhesitatingly recommend Amer to anyone who loves looking at the way the raw building blocks of the language of the cinema can be used to manipulate the senses and attitudes of an audience... this is definitely “future text book” stuff and I can’t wait to see what this writing/directing team do next. A genuine, for once, roller coaster ride of a movie with sounds and images which will be haunting you long after the last frame of celluloid has uncoiled from the projector and I can’t wait to pick up the DVD! Lucky for me the R2 rush-release DVD comes out towards the end of this month then! Hurrah!