After a business trip, a man returns to his swanky pad only to find his wife has gone missing. As he searches for her, he's drawn into the phantasmagorical world of sex and violence hiding behind the doors and walls of the apartment building.
Sort of. I think?
Writers/directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani aren't particularly interested in telling a coherent story or giving you oodles of plot; rather, they've distilled the ideas of the Italian giallo down so much that it's little more than visuals and vibes. (Yes, somehow The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears has less story than your average Argento flick.) Events unfold in an endless array of disorienting angles, stark colors, and odd compositions. While every frame is undeniably a work of art, the assault on your senses becomes too much on occasion–perhaps it's too much of a good thing. The repetition of scenes and shots–even when time isn't literally folding in on itself–might be too much for viewers who wish Cattet and Forzani would just get on with it already.
This lite-on-plot approach means you can assign whatever meaning you want to the film and it works. Maybe it's just about the black-gloved killer lurking in the building. It could be about voyeurism, about the perils of looking in places you weren't meant to see. Or maybe it deals with the pains and pleasures of love and romance.
I found it to be a statement about the fear of women's sexuality, about what happens when women truly take control of their own bodies and sexual agency. One character deals with the banality of married sex by lying still, eyes closed, as her husband silently humps away on top of her. Another discovers what she truly wants and flees. Yet another masturbates her way into mortal danger, and then out of it again as she releases both monsters and protectors. There is a fear of liberation and sexual freedom, and a desire for them. And lawd a-mighty, there are vaginas everywhere. I know, I know–you think I'm being a little too "that song from the Tootsie Roll commercial" about it ("Whatever it is I think I see...becomes a va-gin-a to me!"), but come on now. They're everywhere, from wounds (your body's "tears"–that's \'ters\–indeed) to wallpapers. It is the Where's Waldo of female anatomy. Have a small sample:
As I said, for you, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears may be something else entirely, and that's what's so remarkable and frustrating about the film. Maybe it means nothing! Maybe it's just a bloodied-up fever dream by way of David Lynch, Dario Argento, and Roman Polanski's The Tenant. There's a sort of...hmm, in the interest of not spoiling it, let's call it a nesting dolls made real sequence that for my money is nothing short of brilliant. It's gruesome and nightmarish and one of the finest scenes in modern horror. Still, this film is absolutely not going to work for everyone, so if you don't have the patience for "arty nonsense" or you enjoy, you know, coherence, then buyer beware. Maybe it is just pretty piffle...but I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
10 comments:
It's a frustrating film at times, but I liked it a lot. One thing I really enjoyed was that there was something of an anthology feel to it, all these mini giallos (gialli?) nested inside the larger story. I liked some of those mini stories better than the larger one, actually!
As for the plot itself, I think the landlord was the killer. Someone else I know thinks the first man we saw disappear, the husband of the bored older woman you mentioned, was actually the killer. Who do you think it was?
Agree with everything you said about the "anthology" feel. The way it jumped around and wove time and space together was terrific.
Oh man, who is the killer...both of those suggestions work well! I kind of like the idea of the husband...who is either driven to kill because of the voices (when he disappears) or the voices are the dead haunting him? Not sure if either of those theories would check out, but it certainly would make a re-watch worth it.
I got the anthology feel too, as if each neighbor's story was its own little giallo. This was lovely, and I genuinely liked a great deal of it, but i started to lose patience about halfway through. I also literally said out loud at one point "oh, so that *did* actually happen," which is basically the "that's it, that's the movie" of every giallo I've ever seen.
Man, there's nearly as much vaginal imagery in this movie as in the average Guillermo Del Toro film.
I can't believe I'd never noticed the tears/tears heteronym thang. Although given that the original French title doesn't have that ambiguity, I wonder if it's relevant. I hope it is.
I thought about that, that the French translation wouldn't make it work...but it's so perfect. I mean, all that slashing and all those vaginas...it's a terrific coincidence!
The real killer was the bloody Senor Wences with the straight razor. Having already seen the movie (and really liked it) I don't mind the spoiler but you should try and be more careful with your lead images in the future. Thanks.
S'alright? S'alright.
So i'm guessing the whole movie basically takes place inside Dan's Brain and he's a Schizoid multiple personality case. The " house" with all the different apartments/ mini giallo's are basically those parts of his brain he has sealed of from reality and accountability. Remember his own apartment is locked from the inside.
The other main male characters correspond to some Freudian part of his psyche...The Euro-dubbed Inspector Venticelli being the controlling the superego that has to bring these wilder split parts of Dan' mind together and face the truth. The landlord/owner of the building/Dan's brain has the book containing all the names of the(missing?) girls.
A lot of the characters are spying on each other, from hidden camera's two way mirror/ holes in the ceiling (the older woman discovering her husband became a monster in the ceiling?) Dan being chased by himself and the real Dan wanting to claw out of Dan's own skin. The starting trauma of Dan as a boy witnessing vaginal blood dripping (the Strange tears)is a bit pat in my opinion, but at the same time, oddly poetic explanation for the psycho-sexual aberation that i surmise lead to Dan playing lots of kinky, bloody games with his ladies.
I've seen the movie 3 times. The first time i couldn't make sense of it and it just seemed weird. The second time I thought there was a mysterius spirit of now-dead Laura who forced men to kill. The third time I thought Laura wasn't a spirit and was actually one of the victims of her unnamed brother, who once saw her menstruate, became obsessed and couldn't orgasm withouy seeing a menstruating vagina (that's why he pierced his victims' heads with that dagger that left a kteis looking scar). But then i rewatched the very ending trying to figure out if the landlord was Laura's brother and noticed that the very last seconds reveal a female figure holding her belly and apparently recalling herself menstruating in her younger years, the face of the menstruating girl resembles the first image of Laura in the album of murdered women and her recent hairstyle looks like that of the woman whose husband went missing inside the walls. There was a moment when Laura was said to be either white-haired or dead at the moment of speaking. Well, that woman was white-haired, her story about her husband was unrealistic to the core (especially when he fixed her to the bed and gave her a shot of some sleepinh medicine for actualluy no obvious reason). When she was talking to Dan she preferred to keep her face in the dark and was trembling and suddenly pushed him away. She might have been Laura, and Laura might have killed all of these women (remember her diary notes about being possessed [going insane]). That was probably her who was so traumatised by her own period that she couldn't orgasm (again, we can see the white-haired woman lie still under her husband during their intercourse) without seeing a blood and bleeding kteistic images. Or, maybe, she was accompanied by her younger brother in their insane affairs as, otherwise, the image of that little bou seeing her mentrual blood makes little sense.
Anyway, i guess the name of the movie refers to mentrual blood as well.
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