The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)

The “body’s tears” here is blood and that’s the only thing that I think I know for sure about this abstract homage to classic Italian giallo. It starts as a mystery about a man’s missing wife and then it turns into a graphic design piece full of split-screen, loud color and extreme close-ups. It’s an eyeful that bothers little with things rational and linear. It has more color than clues. It has more editing tricks than twists. Once one gives up on the narrative and realizes that, yes, directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are going to show us that nipple-slicing murder scene yet again (we see it at least three times in a flip-book style succession of still images, and it’s not as harsh as it may sound), it can get a little tedious while at the same time the skill on display commands respect. This has no direct relationship to the content of the film, but I’m reminded here of the real life Black Dahlia murder. Dead girl, chopped up very finely with a skilled surgeon’s hand—it was no clumsy crime of passion—and then left to be discovered in a public place. All of these decades later, the mystery of who did it remains unsolved. Here, Cattet and Forzani take a classic suspense scenario, chop it up meticulously, sever the brain stem, remove some vital organs, leave few clues about what happened and then release it. Mystery unsolved.