Movie Review: Let the Corpses Tan

Let the Corpses Tan *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani.

Written by: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani based on the novel by Jean-Pierre Bastid & Jean-Patrick Manchette.

Starring: Marc Barbé, Bernie Bonvoisin, Dorylia Calmel, Stéphane Ferrara, Bamba Forzani Ndiaye, Dominique Troyes, Elina Löwensohn, Michelangelo Marchese, Pierre Nisse, Marine Sainsily, Tristan Schotte, Hervé Sogne, Aline Stevens.

 

There’s no doubt that the filmmaking team of Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani are an acquired taste. They don’t seem at all interested in such things as narrative, dialogue or characters – they boil cinema down to its bare essentially or visuals and sounds, and then put them through their own grinder to come with something unique. Their first two films – Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears – essentially boiled Giallo horror films down like this – coming up with visually arresting features, that left me both frustrated and impressed. Perhaps knowing their style helped me like their new film – Let the Corpses Tan – more than those ones. Perhaps sensing that their exploration of Giallo had reached its end, here, they take on Spaghetti Westerns and exploitation films – telling the story of a demented artist and her live-in lovers in a remote villa, who find themselves inundated with guests – firsts the wife of one of one her lovers, her sister and her son, then a team of bank robbers with a trunk full of gold, and finally the cops. The vast majority of the movie is one long shootout that lasts over the course of a long night. Characters double and triple cross each other, lots of blood is split, lots of leather is worn – god do these filmmakers love the weather leather clothing creaks and squeaks.

 

There is a limit to how far this style will take you – at least there is for me. I do love narrative and character and dialogue – but there is something freeing about watching a film in which none of that matters, and you can solely concentrate on the sensory experience of a film like this. Every frame, every sound effect has been obsessed over and fetishized. It’s a shame that most people will never see this film on the big screen (I saw it at TIFF, so I am lucky) – because I feel you need to large scale format of a screen, and the sound system to fully appreciate this movie (another reason I may like this more than their previous two – which I saw at home). Still, there is a point where they do start to repeat themselves too often – there’s just a few too many rapid fire edited sequences of gunfire, or creaking leather, or hallucination sequences, etc. The filmmakers, I think, sense this – which why they get in and out in 90 minutes, and not a second more.

 

It’s doubtful that Cattet & Forzani are ever going to have a breakout hit as long as they continue in their style. It’s too idiosyncratic and obsessed with detail, and doesn’t give most audience what they want in terms of genre fare. This movie isn’t about to win them any more fans – but for a certain film fan, it’s a must see. If you liked their first two films, and want to see them tackle a different genre, while keeping their fetishes in plain sight, than Let the Corpses Tan is for you. If you want minor things from a movie – like plot, dialogue or characters, look elsewhere.