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LOCARNO 2013

The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears

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- The film by directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani was specifically conceived as something that needed to be seen more than once in order to be understood and digested, with the idea of letting it slowly mature in the spectator’s unconscious

The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears

When the lights came back on after the press screening, the first thing that came to my mind was a sentence by Nietzsche, “whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity.”

The Strange Colour of your Body’s Tears [+see also:
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, by the admission of its directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani themselves, is chaotic and fragmented, for both artistic and narrative reasons.  In competition at the 66th Locarno Film Festival, the Belgian French and Luxemburg-originating film was met with a tepid reaction from the accredited press. Deciphering the authors’ message, beyond the obvious, was difficult and the aesthetic search through images was invasive.  

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A woman disappears. Her husband is stuck in the building where his apartment is and tries to discover where she may have ended up and why she has disappeared. As he pursues his claustrophobic investigation, he gets caught up in his own nightmares and the ghosts that haunt the sinister art déco building he lives in. The narrative genre is thriller, plunging us into 102 minutes of crude violence where death lurks around the corner, as well as this wife and a possible assassin.

Bruno Forzani explains to us that the confusion that takes over the public after the first screening is absolutely desired and normal. The film was specifically made to be understood and digested after being seen a number of times. It needs to slowly mature in the spectator’s subconscious. Hélène Cattet added that the work of art could be read as “a profound sensorial experience comparable to entering hypnosis.” According to its creators, the film is an instrument to penetrate into audiences’ subconscious in order to touch its deepest impulses, which is the reason behind the chaotic and fragmented structure. 

I wonder who will want to undergo psychoanalysis with L'Étrange Couleur des larmes de ton corps.

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(Translated from Italian)

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