“The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears”
Good (2 stars)
Unrated
In French, Danish and Flemish with subtitles
Running time: 102 minutes
Distributor: Strand Releasing
Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange) could find no sign of his wife Edwige (Ursula Bedena) when he returned home from a business trip. Moreover, the communications executive’s suspicions were aroused by the fact that the chain was across the door when he unlocked their apartment, suggesting that someone ought to be inside.
Inquiring of neighbors only served to compound the mystery, between his landlord who suggested that his wife had a reason to disappear, and the provocatively-dressed elderly senior who tries to seduce him after saying that her husband had disappeared, too. As he makes his way around the building, Dan gradually discovers that the place is a den of iniquity where people participate in all sorts of bizarre sexuality.
With each flat he enters, the sadomasochistic displays revealed are increasingly kinky, eventually even rising to the level of a bloodbath replete with decapitation after the word “decapitation.” Co-directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears” is not so much a mystery with a linear plotline as a surreal thriller designed for cinephiles with a taste for abstraction and eroticized violence.
Undeniably artistic, yet gruesome and harrowing, this atmospheric adventure has a dark, ominous air about it which keeps you braced for something bad for the duration of the entire endurance test. A difficult to decipher whodunit guaranteed to have you still scratching your head even after its confounding resolution.
