French husband and wife team Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet seem to like the giallo genre because the next movie they did after “Amer” (check out my review here: https://www.noisepuncher.net/2021/10/30/revel-in-amer-2009/) a giallo was “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears”, a giallo. Of course they also did the strange modern Western/Poliziotteschi movie “Let the Corpses Tan”(come on over and get your corpse tanned here: https://www.noisepuncher.net/2021/02/12/go-ahead-let-the-corpses-tan-2017/).
Dan (played by Klaus Tange) returns home from a business trip to find that his wife Edwige (played by Ursula Bedena) is missing without any evidence of her leaving or a break in, he starts looking for her in different rooms of the building, the first lady is behind a veil and tells the story of how her own husband went missing after he was hearing voices and sounds behind the wall where he gets stabbed. Soon Dan turns to the police, at first the inspector (played by Jean-Michel Vovk) is dismissive and of no help at all, Dan has a dream of going to the roof top and encountering a nude woman who jumps. The inspector himself has a missing wife and as the movie goes on it does play with giallo genre tropes but goes into Lynchesque, abstract, noir territory with shifting perspectives of reality.
“The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” uses a lot of symbolism and metaphors, sometimes you can’t tell if what Dan is seeing is real or what he perceives to be real, and without giving too much away there is another world within the walls of the building and Dan becomes a voyeur spying on the weird going ons of his neighbors. While to some extent, “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” is less linear then its predecessor “Amer”, this one, in my opinion, is more rich and mysterious. Its true you get the masked killer with razor and brightly lit color scheme of Argento and Bava, you get a lot more of a stylized and noir like atmosphere. I liked “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” more and it is one I want to revisit. The directors claim you need to watch it more than once to get more of the details and more of the stories. This movie will try a lot of people’s patience, even the ones who are into the weird and absurd, that is a warning. This is a love or hate it proposition, if the above description of the movie interests you by all means dive in, if it doesn’t well if you dive in your diving into an empty pool and you will get hurt.
So where do you swim in “The Colour of Your Body’s Tears”? Well you can go here but you’ll have to get a Shudder subscription from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.0ca9f78e-0f49-68fd-350a-1e79e209a76f/ref=dv_auth_ret?autoplay=1&