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.

Classic Movie Review: Amer (2009)

Amer (2009)
Directed by: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani.
Written by: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani.
Starring: Cassandra Forêt (Ana enfant), Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud (Ana adolescente), Marie Bos (Ana adulte), Bianca Maria D'Amato (La mère), Harry Cleven (Le taximan), Jean-Michel Vovk (Le père), Bernard Marbaix (La grand-père mort), Thomas Bonzani (Nono, l'adolescent), François Cognard (La silhouette), Delphine Brual (Graziella), Jean Secq (L'épicier), Béatrice Butler (L'épicière), Charles Forzani (L'agriculteur / L'homme à la voiture rouge).

I had not seen Amer, Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s 2009 debut feature, when I watched their follow-up The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, late in 2014. That film was visually striking from beginning to end – a loving tribute to giallo horror movies, that looks great, but has no narrative, no characters, and eventually starts to repeat itself to the point where despite all the sex and death on display, the movie ended up being quite dull. Amer is similar to their follow-up in many ways – but at least it has a narrative through line that makes sense, and given that the film is split into three stories, about three different erotic instances at various times in a young woman’s life (as a child, as a teenager, as a young woman), it doesn’t repeat itself as often. The film held my interest more than The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears – as there was something deeper than the visuals in this film. But that’s true only to a point. The film still seems rather bloodless to me – more of an academic exercise than a movie. It’s visually stunning, and has many aspects to recommend it, but the film still feels more than a little lifeless.

The movie is split up into three distant chapters. In the first one, Ana is a young girl whose grandfather has just died – and his body is still sitting up in his room. There is a strange, possibly deranged and violent old lady there as well – who may or may not be her grandmother (I lean towards not, since Ana’s mother wants to kick her out, but what do I know?). There’s a pocket watch that opens, and makes strange things happen – that could either save her, or doom her. When she gets scared, she runs to her parents – only to finding them having sex, a moment that imprints her on forever. There are hints of perhaps an incestuous relationship, and other horrors, but they remain that. In the second film, Ana is now a teenage girl – who body is starting to mature, although she doesn’t quite understand the power it gives her. She has to endure the leers of men and boys on the street, and comments like “You’ve grown so much in the past year”, which sound innocent, but are really profoundly creepy – as the men are sexualizing this young girl. Her mother eyes her warily as well – they are in sexual competition with each other, even if, at first, Ana doesn’t quite realize this. There is a motorcycle gang that she walks through – exuding danger – and a breeze that hits her in just the right way, to awaken something sexual inside her. The third – and longest segment – is Ana as a young woman, taking a harrowing cab ride back to her childhood home – now abandoned, and dilapidated. This segment threatens to explode into either violence or full on sex at any moment for the entire runtime – and things become increasingly dangerous as razorblades become involved.

If you know the work of Dario Argento, and other giallo horror masters, you’ll be in familiar territory here. The film takes great pains to look like those classic films, and the subject matter, the sexual awakening of a beautiful, teenage girl, the link between sex and death, the constant threat of violence and blood, is all here. It’s tempting to read a feminist spin on the material – one of the directors is a woman after all – but I’m not sure it’s there. The film is so rooted in homage, that I’m not sure it’s really saying much of anything.

That, in the end, is my problem with Amer. The whole thing seems like an exercise in homage, with nothing new to add to the genre. It doesn’t update, correct or even really comment on the genre is in. it’s just kind of there. The film looks great – but I want to see these directors take on something like Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy. That film was homage, to be sure, but it also subverts the genre and our expectations of it, and ends up at a truly startling and unique place. That really isn’t the case in Amer. Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani are talented directors, who have proven (twice now) that they can deliver the visuals of a giallo horror movie. Now, they simply have to do something more with it.

Movie Review: The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears
Directed by: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani.
Written by: Bruno Forzani & Hélène Cattet.
Featuring: Klaus Tange (Dan Kristensen), Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener, Birgit Yew, Hans De Munter, Anna D'Annunzio, Jean-Michel Vovk, Manon Beuchot, Romain Roll, Lolita Oosterlynck, Delphine Brual, Sam Louwyck, Sylvia Camarda.

There is a plot in The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears – but directors Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani are not much interested in it. Basically, they use their bare bones of a plot to string together a series of striking visuals and set pieces inspired by giallo horror movies from Italian masters like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. A man, named Dan (Klaus Tange), comes home to his apartment to find his wife has gone missing. He investigates the disappearance – and deals with a cop who shows up at inopportune times – to try and figure out what happened. This investigation brings him into contact with his strange neighbors – and also causes some hallucinations and dreams, which is where the bizarre visuals and set pieces come into play. Eventually, the movie does commit to its narrative – kind of anyway, in its closing act, but even then, the movie remains a visual experience, not a narrative one. This isn’t so much a problem with the movie, as much as an observation. The problem is that the visuals start to repeat themselves, everything becomes fractured, and the individual moments – as stunning as some of them can be – never really cohere into a meaningful whole.

Movies like this are difficult to review. You cannot really talk about the acting, because the movie barely requires the actors to act (according to IMDB, only one character even has a name) – they are props as much as anything. You cannot talk about the narrative – because there isn’t really one. So what you are left with is talking about how it all looks and feels.

 

It must be said that the film does look amazing. There are striking images throughout – from an opening image of a blade and a women’s breast, to a masterful sequence of an older couple searching for something. The movie connects sex and violence, and is also about voyeurism. But horror movies have been doing both of things for decades now, and the film doesn’t really have anything of interest to say on either subject – it simply presents them over and over again, and then moves onto the next sequence, where they’ll do the same thing again.

I cannot fully dismiss the film – it does look amazing from start to finish. But what the film made me wish more than anything is that filmmakers would, next time out, not just string together a series of visually striking set pieces, disconnected from each other and everything else, but apply their obvious visual skills, and try to come up with a narrative to match it. Because they didn’t do that this time, what we are left with is a visually stunning movie that despite all the sex and violence is actually quite dull. It would play better as a museum installation piece, where you can see some of the great work, and move on, than as a movie where you sit there and watch it from 100 minutes straight.

Movie Review: The ABCs of Death

The ABCs of Death
Directed by: Nacho Vigalondo (A Is for Apocalypse) , Adrián García Bogliano (B Is for Bigfoot), Ernesto Díaz Espinoza (C is for Cycle), Marcel Sarmiento (D Is for Dogfight), Angela Bettis (E is for Exterminate), Noboru Iguchi (F is for Fart), Andrew Traucki (G is for Gravity), Thomas Cappelen Malling (H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion), Jorge Michel Grau (I is for Ingrown), Yudai Yamaguchi (J is for Jidai-geki), Anders Morgenthaler (K is for Klutz), Timo Tjahjanto (L is for Libido), Ti West (M Is for Miscarriage), Banjong Pisanthanakun (N is for Nuptials), Bruno Forzani & Hélène Cattet (O is for Orgasm), Simon Rumley (P Is for Pressure), Adam Wingard (Q Is for Quack), Srdjan Spasojevic (R Is for Removed), Jake West (S is for Speed), Lee Hardcastle (T Is for Toilet), Ben Wheatley (U Is for Unearthed), Kaare Andrews (V is for Vagitus), Jon Schnepp (W is for WTF?), Xavier Gens (X Is for XXL), Jason Eisener (Y Is for Youngbuck), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Z is for Zetsumetsu).
Written by: Kaare Andrews, Simon Barrett, Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani, Adrián García Bogliano, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Simon Rumley, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Nacho Vigalondo, Dimitrije Vojnov, Ti West, Yudai Yamaguchi.
Featuring: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Erik Aude, Kyra Zagorsky, Lainey, Iván González, Dallas Malloy, Sarah Bonrepaux, Lee Hardcastle, Fraser Corbett, Peter Pedrero, Darenzia, Arisa Nakamura, Yoshie, Hiroko Yashiki, Lucy Clements, M@tch, Yui Murata, Je$$ica, Harold Torres, Matías Oviedo, Alejandra Urdiaín, Takashi Nishina, Chems Dahmani, Vanja Lazin, Eva Llorach, Demo Tanaka, Greg De Cuir, Hiroaki Murakami, Tsuyoshi Kazuno, Pablo Guisa Koestinger, Miguel Insua, Arata Yamanaka, Martine Årnes Sørensen, Sadashi Matsubayashi, Manon Beuchot, Brenden McVeigh, Daisuke Sasaki, Kurumi Ochiai, Hozake Yamada, Xavier Magot, Seminosuke Murasugi, Joshua Diolosa, Juanita Ringeling, Tomomi Sugai, Honoka Murakami, Naoko Takahashi, Greta Martinez, Katsuyuki Miyake, Atsushi Hiroki, Yoshio Komatsu, Kim Richardson.

When you have a film that is just over two hours long, and contains 26 short films about death, I’m not sure how I can go about reviewing the film without it sounding like a hit list – running down the films that work, the films that don’t, and those who fall in the middle. So perhaps it’s lucky for me that the vast majority of the short films in The ABCs of Death are absolute crap – because then it’s easier to pass judgment on the movie as a whole – it sucks. True, there are some interesting shorts, some funny shorts, but none of them are the least bit scary – disappointing for a supposed horror film. And none of them are truly great either. While the idea of the omnibus film is almost always better in theory than it practice, most of them contain one or two truly terrific segments to justify watching the movie as a whole. Not so with The ABCs of Death. I have a feeling that even the best sequences in The ABCs of Death simply look better because of the crap they sit alongside.

The basic concept behind the film is simple. 26 filmmakers are given a letter, and then have to come up with a word, and then get about five minutes to make a short film about death using that word. The movie doesn’t tell you the director or the title of any one film until it ends – then we get the title like “A is for Apocalypse” or “D if for Dogfight” and the director. The 26 filmmakers picked come from around the world – although unless I’m mistaken the Middle East and Africa aren’t represented. For the most part, I hadn’t heard of the filmmakers before seeing this film – and I’m not sure I’ll ever watch another film by most of these filmmakers.

So, let’s rundown the title real quick. The films that work:  D is for Dogfight by Marcel Sarmiento, a disturbing, violent film, wordless film that shows far more promise than the director’s god-awful feature Dead Girl. N is for Nuptials by Banjong Pisanthakun, a funny film about a man, his girlfriend and a parrot that turns deadly. O is for Orgasm by Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet, which is an almost avant-garde little film. Q is for Quack by Adam Wingard, which is essentially about Wingard complaining how he got stuck with the letter Q. R is for Removed by Srdjan Spasojevic, a disturbingly graphic film, that I have no idea what it means, but I will not soon forget. U is for Unearthed by Ben Wheatley, a POV of a man being chased by an angry mob. Best of all is probably Xavier Gens X is for XXL, easily the most disturbing and bloody of the lot.

The films that are terrible include: E is for Exterminate by horror mainstay Angela Bettis, which is simply ridiculous and cheesy. J is for Jidai-geki by Yudai Yamaguchi about a samurai executioner and funny faces. K is for Klutz by Anders Morgenthaler, about a turd that will not be flushed.  P is for Pressure, which takes one ridiculous turn after another. T is for Toilet, a stop motion animated film that doesn’t work on any level.

Somewhere in between are: A is for Apocalypse by Nacho Vigalondo, about a woman attacking the man she was poisoning for months because with what is going outside time has run out. B is for Bigfoot by Adrian Garcia Bogliano, which plays like one of those scary stories we tell kids, because that’s precisely what it is. C is for Cycle by Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, which even at only five minutes starts to repeat itself too soon. G is for Gravity by Andrew Trauki, a POV of a surfer’s last ride. I is for Ingrown by Jorge Michel Grau, which is a somewhat disturbing look at a serial killer and his victim. S is for Speed, a play on exploitation films, with a horrible ending. W is for WTF? By Jon Scnepp, which at least lives up to its name.

And then there are the following films, which are quite simply an absolute embarrassment for all involved. F is for Fart by Noboru Iguchi, which is even more disgusting and ridiculous than the unpromising title. H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion by Thomas Cappelen Malling with people dressed as giant dogs that somehow also involves Nazis. L is for Libido by Timo Tjahjanto about a ridiculous and disgusting competition. M is for Miscarriage by Ti West, who normally I love, but whose film is simply the laziest of the bunch. V is for Vagitus by Kaare Andrews, which kind of played like SNL’s Laser Cats. Y is for Youngbuck by Jason Eisener, who after Hobo with a Shotgun, once again proves why he should never be allowed to direct again. And finally, Z is for Zetsumetsu, which would be offensive if it weren’t so utterly, completely ridiculous.

So, for those you keeping track at home, that is 7 decent films, 6 that are not good, but not horrible, 4 terrible films, and 9 complete embarrassments. That’s not a good average. If there’s a lesson to be learned from The ABCs of Death it’s that omnibus films are almost never a good idea, that trying to squeeze too many into a 2 hour running time is an even worse idea, and that perhaps giving directors “complete artistic freedom” as the prologue states is a bad idea, since when you do, they often come up with complete shit. I doubt I will see a worse film than some of the entries in this omnibus film all year – and the decent chapters cannot save this from being a complete waste of time.