Rent The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013)

The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (aka L'étrange Couleur Des Larmes De Ton Corps) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Avant garde movies like The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears leave me at a crossroads. On one hand, it’s a dizzying pastiche of clever camera tricks and beautiful use of color and photography. It never stops the way it beats you over the head with its varying visuals to illustrate its elusive mystery. But what is being presented is very disgusting and twisted with naked bodies stabbed, stomachs punctured, hands digging under skin and glass crushed into breasts. It’s a desensitized mess of explicit violence and sexuality, yet I just couldn’t look away trying to grasp all of its technical grandeur.

At first the story appears to be about Dan (Klaus Tange) trying to find his missing wife Edwige (Ursula Bedena). He discovers her absence soon after returning from a business trip to his spacious apartment and drinking himself stupid. Searching for clues, he begins to connect with others in the complex that have lost someone as well. But we really don’t learn anything all that much about Dan or any of these characters for that matter. We just know that they’ve experienced something strange and creepy in their lives that separates them from both people and reality. They spill their guts in various ways to Dan be it over tea or during an investigation. At one point Dan asks a detective, who just finished divulging his tale, what his story has to do with anything in the current case.

I’m at a loss for how to describe the rest of the film in its attempt to unravel this little mystery. The entire movie is told in a series of repeated dreams and flashbacks of clues that provide more questions than answers. A woman finds herself trapped in a room with a man in a hat who descends from the ceiling shadows. Dan has a dream without end where he finds himself naked and stabbing in the darkness. A knife runs along the curves of a naked woman, teasing her flesh before slicing it up and finishing the job with a forceful plunge. A recorded piece of audio is played back several times with the line “so you like mysterious phone calls.”

All of these scenes are shot as exceptional art pieces with a noble homage to the Italian gialli films. It’s all texture and mood that washes over and consumes any narrative that may have been intended. What’s implied is heavier focused on than what is there. On that level, this is a very demanding film that never compromises on any solid tone or style. Some scenes are shot as a series of photographs that speed up and slow down to display motion. Others are shot in an array of colors that shift and cascade over one another. Shots change angle and perspective almost at random. The camera morphs into a kaleidoscope as if it toying with the viewer’s perspective. Just describing all the choices in photography is making me as dizzy as the shots themselves.

This is the type of film much like The Trip that exists on its own as something maddeningly different. Is it an experimental examination of the dark depths of sexuality or is it just a trippy series of neat shots? Is it actually conveying a mystery or is it just a farce? Does anything on screen hold any water or is it just an empty shell of nihilism? The film never gives a clear answer and leaves the audience baffled at what they believe they saw.

The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is that one art film that brings about frustrating discussions on what it was and what it meant. At the end of the day, however, it’s just too grizzly and disturbingly violent to find something to latch onto in this stylish dance. I can’t exactly recommend the film for its cringe-worthy moments such as breasts forcing themselves into glass shards. But, on a technical level, I can’t fault it for being a never-ending cavalcade of gorgeous design and imagery. It ends up being one of the most beautiful pieces of film I’ve ever seen that I didn’t enjoy. If a friend asked me if he or she should see this picture, I suppose I would say yes, but come armed with plenty of artistic appreciation and a high threshold for on-screen pain.