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

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is a 2013 neo-giallo written and directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. It tells the story of a businessman (played by Klaus Tange) who returns home from a business trip to find his wife is missing. As he tries to find her by speaking to other residents of the strangely opulent apartment building in which they live, he hears some of their stories, and gets dragged into an increasingly hallucinatory series of events in which the border between reality and (erotic) fantasy becomes more and more blurred. Like the classic giallo, Strange sticks to the most basic structure of the mystery (there is a crime and then an investigation) and it is also typical of the giallo in that the mystery is as much a question of perception as it is an ontological fact. In other words, we can’t be absolutely sure that a crime has even taken place, let alone whom the perpetrator might be. It should be noted, however, that this is not at all a weakness in either this film or in the genre as a whole; indeed, it is this mix of the gestural respect paid to ratiocination along with the overwhelming presence of the surreal the defines the giallo. In this regard, those who criticize Strange for having no discernible narrative structure are missing the point entirely. With that said, the vast majority of Italian gialli do contain some kind of resolution to the mystery—it may be outlandish and unconvincing (in fact, all the better if it is!) but it’s usually there. Strange lacks even a weak resolution and no amount of visual style (with which this film is packed) can quite compensate for this absence.