In The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears directors Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani honed what they learned making Amer and are able to transcend that cinematic experience into a purely visceral one. The film is yet another entry into the neo-giallo genre that offers nothing short of a pure psycho-sensual sensory overload for the duration of its running time. The film opens Friday in both Los Angeles and New York.
The film is the story of Dan, a wealthy businessman who comes home from a trip to find his wife missing and his apartment locked from the inside and ransacked. As Dan searches for answers, he finds that his wife, who had become bored with her life of leisure and sick of him, had become obsessed with the mysterious Laura, one of the tenants in their apartment building.
What Dan finds as he begins to dig deep into not only the history behind Laura, but the beautiful apartment building they inhabit is a strange world of voyeurism, magic, and murder all layered and buried deep in sexual metaphors. Like Amer, The Strange Color’s narrative isn’t cut and dried as in most films, but rarely does a film do it as beautifully as this, leaving enough to viewer interpretation to require repeated viewings to unlock all of the sordid mysteries of the film.
Unlike giallos of the past, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears forgoes almost all exposition in favor of it’s multi-layered story approach that mixes equal parts Suspiria and Lost Highway in how it plays with both characters and time as both fluid and interchangeable concepts. With this style of narrative, mysteries that would seem contrived and clichéd take on a whole new life as the film keeps looking deeper and darker into the hiddenmost recesses of the human psyche and exploring them on screen.
The Strange Color manages to pair the stylistic choices from the directors’ short films into a film that is equal parts Kubrick, Lynch, and Argento all in their primes. It’s a rich tapestry of beautifully horrific visuals, intricate production design, and jarring sound design that cohesively deliver an experience that is the purest example of cinema as art as I have ever seen it. After watching Amer, which is one of my all time favorite films, I was honestly a little worried they could match that level of beauty and intensity; but Strange Color’s assault on the senses is a wondrous thing to behold.
Due to the sensory deprivation-like state of the theater, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is a film that needs to be seen in a cinema to truly cast its spell. It’s a film that begs every ounce of attention and will leave you almost in a state of euphoria as the credits roll. The Strange Color is a masterpiece of the genre and a film unlike anything you have seen this year. The only question then becomes what will these filmmakers do next?
Click here to read Dan’s interview with co-director Bruno Forzani.