By Tristan Bishop
The giallo seems to be growing in popularity year by year. The current surge of interest in the genre can perhaps be credited to (or at the least has been heavily bolstered by) the discovery and championing of the soundtracks to these very Italian murder mysteries by DJs, record collectors and vinyl reissue companies, which in turn leads people to seek out the films the scores were originally recorded for. A whole new generation of horror fans being weaned on black-gloved killers brandishing straight razors, replacing those who burnt themselves out on ordeal horror and found footage is a nice idea (although, if I am to let my snobbish side show for a moment, I can’t be the only one slightly annoyed when people misuse ‘giallo’ to refer to any Italian horror film, and I still insist that Suspiria isn’t one), especially when it means brand new examples of the form are being released.
The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (gotta love that title, eh?) is the latest in the line of neo-gialli, following on from Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet’s previous film Amer (2009) and their ABCS Of Death (2012) segment ‘O Is For Orgasm’. Whilst the former dealt with three separate incidents in (one presumes) the life of a woman, and the latter was a pop art collage dealing with sex and death. Strange Colour attempts, at least on the surface, to take a straightforward thriller plot and reflect it through the duo’s obsessions and cutting edge film techniques.
Klaus Tange is Dan Christensen, who upon returning home from a business trip, discovers his wife is missing. His increasingly hallucinogenic search for her takes in an array of characters that live in their building, from a mysterious old woman who relates a scary tale of her husband’s disappearance, to a woman called Barbara, who enjoys naked rooftop smoking. A suspicious police inspector and a disgruntled landlord get swept along in the search, eventually learning that the building contains secret passages and rooms behind the walls of the apartments, and attendant revelations/fates for each of them.
A little odd but fairly straightforward plot-wise you might think, but this one is as metaphysical as they come. At times you might think that Klaus has killed his wife, or that she has simply run off, or that he never had a wife at all, or that, perhaps, the entire building is a metaphor for male fear and desire of women. There are no easy answers here – I’ve now seen the film twice and I have no more clue of what it was really about after the second viewing. But it’s not a film about answers, or really much about narrative at all – a lot of it plays out like an experimental art film, with kaleidoscopic images, quickly-edited still frames and all manner of trick camera work.
What the film IS about is style, and not only in the techniques used. Forzani and Cattet know their gialli, and the film is a love story to the opulent style and sleazy violence of those 1970’s gems. From the astounding music sourced from Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai’s soundtrack work (not all of it from gialli originally), to the be-gloved, mysterious killers with their knives and razors, even down to the name of Christensen’s wife, Edwige (after Edwige Fenech, one of the quintessential stars of the genre).
But whereas in a 1970’s giallo, elements of surrealism would sometimes creep into the thriller framework – reaching its pinnacle with Guilio Questi’s totally barking (and quite brilliant) Death Laid An Egg (1968) – here we have full-on madness, with the directors quite literally tearing down the walls of genre form and twisting recognisable aspects into their own psycho-sexual voyage. In my opinion it’s not as focussed a film as Amer, and slightly tests the patience over the course of 102 mins (one scene involving a buzzer going off several times seems to be deliberately grating), but the astonishing visual style of that film is in overload here, and whether you enjoy this film or not will rest entirely on whether you can let go of logic and concrete narrative and enjoy the ride or not. For my part, I loved it.
The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears is released on Region 2 DVD on 23rd June 2014, from Metrodome.