Saturday, January 17, 2015

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013, Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani)

I'll confess, I'm not the biggest 'giallo' fan as it is, so the idea of a French/Belgian 'arthouse' spin on the genre had me moderately interested for a potential change-of-pace. It turned out to be one of the worst films I've seen in quite a while.

A guy gets back from a business trip to discover his wife is missing. In his efforts to find her, he uncovers some mysteries involving other tenants in his building - things having to do with people hiding in walls and a killer who stabs people in the top of their skulls, leaving wounds that represent vaginas for some odd reason...

Nothing makes any sense, yet nothing really happens in this film. It's a drawn out, self-indulgent bore-fest that truly epitomizes the saying "all flash, no substance". They were obviously going for the heavily stylized, visually based 'art film' tenor, but the result is simply an endless marathon of repetitive kaleidoscope imagery, extreme close-ups and full scenes of this 'jerky' type of editing that became incredibly annoying. Even if there was an intelligible plot to be found in this flick, chances are you wouldn't be able to understand it purely due to the clusterfuck way in which it was shot. Needless to say, I have no idea what the point of all the apparent randomness was, given the predictably abrupt and opaque ending. So if you get off on watching redundant and arbitrary pastiches of strung together pointlessness than I'm sure you'll probably jizz your pompous shorts over "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears". Otherwise, horror and 'gialli' fans should steer clear.

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