The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)

 
 

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani

written by Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet

Strand Releasing

2013

 

 

Although it's only a decade old, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears looks more like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, with its unsettling blend of blood and sexuality, the uncanny repetitions and re-dos of Celine and Julie Go Boating, or Jan Svankmajer's Alice, with its creepy stop-motion skeletons, than like anything from the last 30 years.

 

The plot, such as it is, is relatively simple, but the story isn't told in a straightforward way, and by the end, I doubt that we're supposed to think that there's anything as solid as a 'real' story amidst the parade of images.

 

A man comes home to his absurdly Art Nouveau apartment to find his wife missing. He questions the neighbors, calls a private investigator, searches the building, and finds a series of secret passages. He also keeps encountering the same enigmatic woman in a number of different guises.

 

As the film continues, the already tenuous distinction between 'reality,' flashback, dream, fantasy, hallucination, and story told by another person recounting one of the above, dissolves completely. We see the same events several times, sometimes identically, sometimes with variations. People, especially the husband, are repeatedly cut with razor blades and knives, only to see their wounds vanish moments later. People die, and then are still alive. The sex is all sadistic. The mysterious woman, Laura, is powerful in a way that all the others are helpless within this surreal world.

 

The most notable thing about the look of this movie is the editing. I don't think there's a single shot that's held for more than a couple seconds. The editing deliberately creates dis-continuity rather than the usual illusion of seamless movement. Actions start and restart, repeat partway through. Scenes are interlaced with each other and with brief flashes of imagery. Parts of the movie are shown in low-frame-rate stop-motion, like we're flipping through a stack of photographs.

 

It's a unique visual experience. It don't think I'd describe how I felt about this one as 'liking it,' but I am glad I watched it. I'm always interested to see movies that experiment, that try something new, show me something I haven't seen before.

 

 

Originally watched January 2023.