A leather glove tightened. Sweat dripping down a lined face. The snap of a firearm being loaded. The glow emanating from a gold bar. Let The Corpses Tan (2017; Laissez bronzer les cadavres) luxuriates in these details, fetishing them in close up and heightened sound design. As filmmakers, Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani have a love of genre cinema, but they way they express it is truly original, in my opinion, but very divisive. Aesthetics become primary, narrative and dialogue secondary as a focus. It’s about the image, the sound and the cut (both figurative and literal). Let The Corpses Tan is my favourite of their three films (so far) and it has a clearer story, based on the pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid. Rather than the giallo pastiche of the couple’s previous films, Amer and The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears, Let The Corpses Tan is beholden to spaghetti westerns and Euro-crime thrillers.
Set on an island in Corsica, the story basically deals with a standoff between a group of thieves hiding out in an artist’s house and a pair of motorcycle cops accidentally on their trail. The loot is a fat stack of gold bars and caught in the crossfire are the resident artists and visitors as well as a scheming lawyer, the connection between the two groups. There is erotic tension felt between some of them, and the film’s style is heavily invested in the erotics of everyone’s faces. Think of the climax to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly but stretched out to ninety minutes as time is slowed down with time-code intercuts and incorporating everyone’s perspective, jumping back and forth by a few minutes. A standoff, but it’s also an eternity. Surrealistic interludes depict a shadowy nude woman towering over strangers, either being subjugated or dominating those in her path. Some kind of hovering dreamscape where fate and power are depicted.
I’ve always wanted to revisit this one. I remember seeing this in the cinema thanks to Revelation Film Festival, loving it for the most part, but nodding off a bit in the third act due to the stop-start approach to pacing and the nocturnal passage before the sunrise climax. After having now seen Cattet-Forzani’s other films and being more used to their fractured commitment to style, I was more ready for it. This is my favourite of their work so far and it really simmers in the visceral details: sweat, skin, gold, leather, blood, piss. There is something difficult about their experimental, abstract approach. But I also think their films are quite unique and singular in how they remix their influences for visual and sonic impact. Features a cast of actors largely unknown to me, but obviously cast for their faces and their looks – the main stand out is the person I recognise most, Romanian-American actor Elina Löwensohn as the most mysterious, bewitching of the artists. The excellent soundtrack is compiled from other film scores including the work of Ennio Morricone, Stelvio Cipriani and Nico Fidenco. Available to stream on SBS On Demand in Australia. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 