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Let the Corpses Tan
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Rather than the fuzzily defined grandeur of a cinema of excess, the films of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani tend more to a cinema of stylistic inflation. Their first feature (after an impressive string of shorts), Amer in 2009, offered a diverting abstraction of giallo types and tropes – still more-or-less reined-in by a narrative framework. Then The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (2013) went the way of inflation in its re-taking of giallo. More and more, it seemed, Cattet & Forzani wished to fulfill the signal dream of many 1980s-and-beyond filmmakers, a dream which went all the way back to Jean Epstein in his early 20s during the early ‘20s: to make a ‘cinephilic’ genre film that was solely comprised of highpoints, flashpoints, paroxysmic pirouettes of style – the distillation of a genre (or several genres in one). Which is, as it turns out, easier to even slightly achieve in much-shorter-than-90-minute formats. Having to balance a feature-length plot against constantly spasming paroxysm is no easy feat – but Cattet & Forzani certainly give it their all. Third time out of the feature gate for the team was Let the Corpses Tan in 2017. (Seven years later, they are set to return with a ‘Eurospy homage’, Reflection in a Dead Diamond.) Corpses aims to be an action film in overdrive. It’s Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino and Miike Takashi territory this time, rather than the exhausted shell of giallo. Sadly, it conforms to the pattern of their career thus far: each film more inflated than the last, but also less interesting. Maybe their new one will turn that trend around. Shot mainly in Corsica, the story of Corpses (derived from a typically grisly Jean-Patrick Manchette novel) sets up a complicated vipers’ nest of hoods holed up in the already seething domestic situation of an artist, Luce (Elina Löwensohn in her proudly witchy era as both performer and director, associated with Bertrand Mandico). And then the cops arrive and it’s an almighty shootout. This is a weird movie that keeps one’s spectatorial attention purely through the application of incessant, cattle-prod-like shocks. The constantly jolting transitions in and out of fantasy sequences matters more than the actual erotico-violent content of anything occurring in them. Be clear: I’m not complaining about ‘not being involved in the characters’ – because that’s never what’s on these filmmakers’ twin-minds. But the metronomic repetition of their prize stylistic ‘moves’ here is numbing rather than galvanising. Cattet & Forzani shoot and cut fetishistically at every moment – it’s the principal way they inflate everything in the action-mode. Details, details! The rapt attention to eyes, guns, holes, ants, loud noises, textures, faces fit into frames (the Leone schtick) is so relentless that fetishism (of whatever sort) entirely loses its charge and meaning. It becomes just an obsessive manner, pitched somewhere between Lucile Hadžihalilović (whose mania for J.-P. Melvillian description is far more exacting and finely tuned) and Tarantino. The latter yardstick is evident in the plot premise (such as it is) of characters-in-a-landscape just killing each other gruesomely, one at a time, for the (literal) gold supposedly waiting at the end of this bloodstained rainbow. You can guess where that dream goes. Along with the fantasy inserts (Oja Kodar-style for Löwensohn!), there are endless ‘temporal rewinds’ (even the timeline display of hours and minutes is duly fetishised), crazy ultra-Kubrickian credits, and (of course) an ‘Italian exploitation’ soundtrack of thundering crescendos every other second. To think that there’s a book in English on these filmmakers – The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani – and not yet a decent one on Jim McBride, Penelope Spheeris … or even Josef von Sternberg! It’s film culture, not the films, which is truly ‘strange’ these days. © Adrian Martin November 2022 / November 2024 |