Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Yannick Renier
Fabio Testi
Koen De Bouw
Manon Beuchot
Hervé Sogne
Maria de Medeiros
Sébastien Landry
Kezia Quintal
Aline Stevens
Sophie Mousel
Céline Camara
Thi Mai Nguyen
Steven van Hauwermeiren
Amaury Bogaerts
Olivier Bisback
Nilton Martins
Mukadi Mukendi
Frédérique Derycke
Kiluangi Wolf
Légion von Creed
Rating: 6.1/10
For over fifteen years, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, a Belgium-based, French husband-and-wife filmmakers, have remained among the most distinctive visual stylists in European cinema. Set almost entirely inside an architecturally elaborate Art Nouveau Brussels apartment building, the film follows a man (a saturnine Tangeabulary of genre filmmaking. What began as an exploration of giallo has expanded into a broader meditation on trauma, memory, eroticism and the perception of looking. Across their four features, they have refined an aesthetic that is at once sensuous, abrasive and unmistakably their own.
Cattet & Forzani’s debut feature AMER floats their cegialloartistic provocation: what happens when cinema abandons exposition and moves directly into the expressionism? The film is a three-part exploration of a woman’s life, capturing the evolution of her desires and fears with minimal dialogue and maximal sensory intensity. The film’s visual strategy - extreme close-ups, color-drenched lighting, and fetishistic attention to texture - acts as a direct descendant of Italian giallo, but stripped of any nostalgic softness and narrative cogency.
In lieu of developing a plot, the directors train their focus on the morbid allure of spook, sexual threat and slasher. Childhood curiosity slips into dread; adolescent seduction becomes a choreography of glances and gestures; adulthood is haunted by shadows that refuse to resolve into shapes. The result is a cradle-to-grave experience built from a willful arrangement of genre set pieces, and frankly, their executions are more showboating than substantial (tellingly, their guidance to the players are almost nonexistent, a lacking would persist throughout their works. Plainly, actors go through the motions like mannequins, cue by the offscreen indicators to project a particular emotion, like fear, petulance, or anxiety). AMER is a debut that draws a line: this is the cinema to be felt rather than cerebrally understood.
The duo’s follow-up, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS plunges further into the ceaselessly unresolved labyrinth. Set almost entirely inside an architecturally elaborate Art Nouveau Brussels apartment building, the film follows a man (a saturnine Tange) searching for his missing wife - a premise the directors treat less as a plot than as a psychological trigger.
Rooms fold into bizarre memories, fantasies echo into lurid, Pirandellian nightmares, and the building becomes a metaphor for the protagonist’s deteriorating sense of self, where his sanity goes off the deep end as occurrences turn exceedingly weird and illogical. Editing is used like a scalpel - cutting, repeating, fragmenting - while the soundscape magnifies every whisper, every metallic scrape, every imagined footstep behind a locked door. The duo’s interest in the threshold between perception and delusion reaches full force here. It challenges a viewer’s attention span, who, once it clocks to them that the central mystery isn’t going to be solved neatly, may struggle to retain one’s curiosity after the unrelieved fusillade of optic attack. AI seems to be a better spectator for it than us mankind.
With LET THE CORPSES TAN, Cattet & Forzani leave the claustrophobic shadows behind and step into searing Mediterranean daylight. At first glance, the film is a genre exercise: a gang of thieves, a painter with a volatile imagination, two bumbling cops, a secluded hideout, and a bloodshed is in the pipeline. It is actually based on a Jean-Patrick Manchette novel. But the directors approach pulp the way gem-cutters approach raw stone - by chiseling away until only the essential surfaces remain. It is a Spaghetti Western melted in a furnace.
Sunlight is the dominant force, bleaching the screen until everything vibrates with heat. Gunfights unfold like ritualized dances; hallucinations burst in with appealing extravagance; and the film’s pacing is governed by the rhythm of bodies, weapons and the relentless ticking of time (sometimes it boomerangs as an all-too-frequent nuisance). Underneath the stylized violence lies a pointed commentary on artistic obsession. The artist Luce (Löwensohn) presiding over the hideout treats chaos as a kind of muse, blurring the boundary between creation and destruction. It is as though the directors are reflecting on their own craft: how far can stylization go before it becomes a form of delirium? Clearly, their experimenting hasn’t reached any boundaries yet. A sunburnt western-noir hybrid sharpened to a gleaming edge, LET THE CORPSES TAN is accessible plot-wise, but the rub perdures, its allure palls quickly, when there is all style with little substance, no way a viewer can be empathetic with the goings-on, no matter how spectacularly and idiosyncratically they are executed. There is no persona, just expressive cyphers, boasting an avant-garde edge that suits better for a MV director than a feature-length filmmaker. It is a genre film without pull.
Their most recent feature, REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND, which is allotted a Chinese cinema release window (naturally, it only earns peanuts while the market is monopolized by a record-breaking ZOOTOPIA 2), marks a new phase in the duo’s evolution - one that retains their sensory intensity while deepening their thematic ambition.
The film’s protagonist is John Diman (Testi, a younger version is played by Renier), a retired intelligence operative in his seventies, dwelling in a seaside hotel on the Côte d’Azur. When his mysterious next-door neighbor disappears, Diman becomes enmeshed in another labyrinth of recollections: covert missions, betrayals, and fragments of a life spent performing heroism as though it were a role he was never quite sure he deserved.
Cattet & Forzani treat Diman’s memory as a prism. Scenes appear, fracture, and return with slight variations - as if the film itself were rearranging the pieces, searching for a version of the past that fits. Stylistically, the directors evoke the aesthetic codes of 1960s Eurospy cinema: bold colors, angular framing, expressive silhouettes. But these elements appear through the haze of age and disorientation, like memories replayed on a cracked reel. The result is a portrait of masculinity unraveling under its own myths. Diman’s remembrances are seductive and unreliable; his identity, built on half-remembered assignments, feels more constructed than lived. The “dead diamond” of the title becomes a metaphor for memory under pressure - coruscating, resistant, and ultimately opaque.
It is the duo’s most emotionally resonant work, a film about aging, performance and the uneasy space between legend and truth, also serves as a deconstruction of the cold-war secret agent mythos. And while still unmistakably Cattet & Forzani - full of tactile detail, exquisite sound design and framings sharp enough to cut glass - it demonstrates a new willingness to linger on something more personal.
Across four features, the duo’s pattern emerges: leather, sweat, metal, skin, smoke, stone - texture as storytelling; breath, echoes, mechanical hums, heightened silence - sound as emotional logic; narratives built through sensation rather than linear exposition; plus a fascination with faces and gazes - their inscrutability, seduction and inherent instability, habitually lensed through extreme close-ups. They strip the giallo genre of its "mystery" plot and leave only the raw nerve endings: the black leather gloves, the widening eyes, the sound of tearing flesh, all aided by a strobe-light palette and a rapid-fire editing rhythm (moving image in its purest form). Their films may cause vertigo, ocular stimulation, and a mortal fear of switchblades, but on the debit side, you must be a bit masochist to veritably swallow what this sui generis pair of retromeisters has been conjured, cooked and dished up.
referential entries: Jaco Van Dormael’s THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (2015, 6.8/10); Thomas Cailley’s THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (2023, 7.2/10); Peter Strickland’s BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012, 5.9/10); Lucio Fulci’s THE PSYCHIC (1977, 7.0/10); Sergio Leone’s FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965, 7.6/10).
看完《复联3》，虽然影片还留了不少问题。但是，作为最近还蛮火的灭霸，有个问题不知当问不当问。
除了灭霸有无限手套，
还有谁有无限手套呢？
网友们有！
不知道这位网友家长看了，作何想法？
蔡依林也有！
下足功夫的小公主，不知道洗碗的时候会不会有很大的威力？
还有他们……
不不不……
正确的打开方式是这样的！
没镶钻版极简风的“无限手套”！
来自于法国电影《晒尸体》的警察“无限手套”。
虽然没有镶钻，但是大家看海报给这个手套可是展现了极大的威力呀！
这部法国cult、实验、先锋的电影，警察不是主角，也没有灭霸的响指厉害，但却是个血腥玩人性的高手，还有各种对称镜头，竟然cult到谁都不懂？
这种警察与匪徒之间的较量真是血的教训。
故事发生在美丽的地中海沿岸的村落。
女艺术家寻找绘画灵感，男作家则整天睡在废弃的教堂。
另外，还有四个匪徒。
大哥、胖子、律师和青年。
他们抢劫了一箱金条后，顺路载了两个女人和一个小孩回去。
结果，他们是作家的老婆和孩子，另一人是保姆。
然而，作家的老婆却是从前夫那里带着孩子逃出来的，警察正在跟踪。
匪徒们吓破了胆，马上藏好金条，销毁了各种证据，等待警察的到来。
一男一女两个警察，通过线索很快就找到了这里。
下面，才开始进行真正的杀戮。
独自行动的女警察率先领了盒饭，被打爆了眼睛。
所以，男警察开始了一人与众人的较量。
男警察的单枪匹马堪称牛批！
能在陌生的废墟里与这些人进行枪战，利用好了各种人和物件，能活一会儿是一会儿。
但是，更为精彩的是影片的后半段，这四个匪徒之间为了钱而相互残杀。
之后的故事，影片分多个由时间组成的叙事线展开，每个时间段发生的故事，层层道出这个匪徒与警察之间的“战争故事”，充满暴力和血腥。
然而，这样一个cult片被导演拍出了“韦斯·安德森”的感觉，当然颜色上也是对比鲜明，还有些小清新的感觉。
影片的开头就是这样一个“文艺”的开场。
女艺术家“泼墨”，胖子开枪，与律师三人形成对称镜头。
画、人物穿着、蓝天白云，以及各有各的小心思。
而杀人的漫画场景，是不是有些眼熟？
总觉得像是《杀死比尔》里的色彩鲜明和构图。利用漫画形式展现实拍不能表现的残暴人物。
当然还有故事。
从故事到多线叙事的方式，层层不断解构人物，种种谜题纷纷浮现，这部电影正是借鉴了盖·里奇著名的《两杆大烟枪》之类的多线叙事电影。
多种角度看到故事的发展，以及人物之间微妙的关系，的确具有单一叙事线的没有的效果。
除此之外，影片常用的嘴部特写和吃食物的镜头，当然也是从史云梅耶的电影学来的。
肥头大耳朵的胖子，吃着油腻腻的肉，充分调动起观众的视听刺激。
当然，肉体与肉体的碰撞，带来的不一定是愉快的感觉。
当然，还有cult片最不能少的性和暴力。
影片展现存在的人物之间的暴力行为，以及人物想象中的性和性暗示。
两种cult元素交替出现。
虽说电影的视听效果达到了，但是对于更在意故事和内涵的观众来说，并不满意这种“炫技”的电影。
尤其是故弄玄虚的故事！
这部片子硬是把一个简单的故事拍出了“世纪大谋杀”，其实就是一个“人为财死”的故事，根本用不到那么复杂的技巧，技巧用多了，除了使影片杂糅，故事混乱，还容易引起观众的反感。
所以，一部电影除了要带给观众视听上的刺激，重要的还是一部电影能讲好一个故事。
但是，这部电影最最最缺乏的就是故事本身。
整部影片几乎全程使用这些技巧来叙事，而忽略了构成影片的人物。
影片中最为出彩的应该就是，女艺术家了。
但是，影片除了给她了两个画画的镜头就是以“性”为主要内容的镜头了，几乎上是忽略了构成故事的“人物背景、台词、动作”。
不过，对于cult片来说，上述中说到的“人物背景、台词、动作”并没有那么重要。但是故事还是需要讲的，本片给出的模糊背景和太短的台词，需要多看几遍的故事，仍然是欠缺的。
所以，这个女艺术家在片中显得“无所事事”，甚至很多情况下有些“神经质”了，虽说是未尝不可的做法，但是缺乏交待，使人物莫名其妙。
和大多数看过的观众感受相似，就是这部电影太乱了。
即便是影片的高潮部分，警察和四个匪徒相互明白了杀戮的最终目标。
而导演还在忙着炫技，毫不在意观众是否能够看清角色的脸，或是黑暗条件下观众能否理解这荒唐的剧情。
不过，国内外的审美确实不同。
这部《晒尸体》在烂番茄新鲜度95%，18鲜，1烂。
平均分6.7，比豆瓣高半分。
相比起注重“叙事”的国内观众，国外观众似乎更喜欢看得“爽”！
很多人看cult片就是看一个刺激，但也有人看cult片就是寻找那种现实生活中坏人的不到的那种肉体上的惩罚。
分不清究竟是为了制造cult而cult的电影好，还是用cult宣扬内容的电影好。
反正，电影总能带给我们些什么。
就好像这部电影的结局。
男人们厮杀，女人孩子逃亡。
偷来的金条化为金水，做坏事的人终将不得好报。
【作者宋俣萱 文章首发于“巴塞电影”】
很多人看完这部片子可能都会觉得这部影片的形式很花俏，似乎有形式大过内容之嫌。其实这部片子蛮值得推荐的，尤其是对于还在学电影的或者已经开始干电影的。
在审美趣味上我是偏向于电影的“艺术向”（不太准确的讲就是“形式”）而非“故事向” （不太准确的讲就是“内容”）。尽管美学上厚此薄彼，但要成为一个成功的作品，我也认为形式终归要和内容有效的配合起来才行。这片子我看了好几遍，主要就是判断导演运用的令人眼花缭乱的镜头（形式）是如何服务于故事（内容）的。结果越看越觉得无懈可击。
先来个观影建议：首先，这部影片的重点不在于“故事“，而在于”影像“。带给观众快感的不是掌握故事和人物的来龙去脉，而是各种出乎意料的视觉体验。导演通过极丰富的影像推进故事，是镜头驱动而非人物行动驱动。这部影片的影像逻辑大于故事逻辑。其次，一定至少要看两遍。第一遍大概看明白了故事，体验了导演风格之后，在第二次观看时就可以逐步拆解导演这一锅貌似花里胡哨的大杂烩了。很多人看过之后会感觉好像没怎么看明白这个故事，其实这部影片的故事是个很平庸的故事，为了避免拍成一部平庸的电影，导演追求极度风格化的影像呈现，采用复杂的技术手法将一个简单的故事包装成了一个令人迷惑的影像迷宫。
为了方便讲述，先剧透一下：三个人抢劫了一堆金条，躲在一个荒凉的海边别墅。海边别墅还住着一个女画家和两个男人。其中一位是个作家，他的老婆带着孩子和保姆在路上刚好搭上了匪徒的顺风车来找他。另一个是“律师”，他没有直接去抢劫但和抢劫的匪徒是一伙的。两个警察循迹追来，警匪交战，匪徒内部同时也因各怀私心展开内斗，最后4个匪徒和2个警察都死了。作家和他老婆孩子保姆成功脱逃，女画家回归逍遥。
这部影片的价值在于导演精湛的技术和独特的美学风格。这是一个用感官去感受而非用脑子去思考的电影。所谓电影最精简的定义就是“用镜头讲一个故事”。 “讲故事”并不是电影这种媒介的独特/本质属性，用镜头语言组成一套自洽的叙事才是。从这种意义上，这部影片可以说是一部非常“纯粹”的电影。影片首要服务于观众的视觉满足，快感来自即刻而非深刻，来自情绪而非思索。
总结几点：
1， 导演大量使用非常规镜头。焦点方面有：变焦镜头，双焦镜头；角度方面，大仰角和俯角拍摄；景别方面，超大特写与大全景镜头交替使用。所有这些成系统使用的非常规镜头都在挑战人类的眼睛，意在呈现通常人眼无法看到的细部和无法看清的疆域。这些镜头按照惯例是非常不自然且对叙事破坏力极大，而导演似乎故意要拿观众的观影习惯开玩笑，排斥一切标准和惯例，颠覆常规。尽管反常，但超级好看。是非常新颖有趣的视觉体验。
2， 镜头衔接。镜头衔接是非常重要的导演技巧。影片中所有镜头和镜头的连接方式都被导演谨慎的考虑了。篇幅所限，仅举一例：吃早餐时女画家和黑老大在长条餐桌前分坐两头，镜头没有选用正反打，而是从一边迅速摇到另一边。恨不得把影片剁的碎成渣的导演在这里并没有选择切开两人，而是在一个完整空间里展现两个人的对垒，暗示出后面不可避免的冲突。影片貌似混乱纷杂，其实镜头与镜头高度协调一致。让叙事服从画面逻辑
3， 导演的镜头明显超载了。像盖房子一样，用了超量好几倍的砖。所幸这些过量的砖块严丝合缝的搭出了没有瑕疵的结构。每一个镜头都与前面的镜头产生关联，是对之前镜头的发展，解释，补充。少一块可能都会让叙事出现漏洞。对故事的理解完全依赖于对镜头在整体运用上的理解。这些镜头建造了一个异常封闭的时空，影片在自己建构的世界里自我完满。导演完全没有邀请观众参与的姿态。只顾燃烧自己的叙事疯狂，观众只能痛并快乐的承受着导演令人精疲力尽的电影语言。
4， 碎片化剪辑。这部片给人感觉导演在干脆利落的同时剁着20种馅料的饺子馅，该切就切，绝不手软。导演会毫不犹豫的切断一个正在进行的动作，随即插入另一个动作，经典一例是光头肥男躺在吊床里意淫女画家。切的大胆且过度切割。眼睛，眼睛看到的A、B、C、D；手，手里拿的东西1、2、3、4。别人做一盘饺子陷假设需要1262刀，导演一定要剁出2538刀，就是为了获得超量的菜肉颗粒。各种直接而突兀的插入镜头以各种方式打断叙事，却在整体上成就了另一种叙事。观众在碎片之间完全没有任何喘息之机，就被导演拉入下一个时空，一路跟的气喘吁吁。
5， 多视角。明显一例：女警察被一枪击中，同一动作用不同视角多次重复（一共是5次）呈现了一遍，观众得以抓住动作的每一个瞬间，一般影片里这种瞬间的精确呈现通常不重要，事实上这种瞬间也不在人们的日常体验当中。观众可以自行脑补出一个动作没有完整呈现出来的部分，但导演在这里全然不顾时间线，刻意让观众体验了一下不同人物对同一件事的同时性的所见所闻。逆转时间逻辑，多角度再现同步发生的动作，给观众纯粹物理性的体验。大胆绝妙的操作！
6， 由于上述的剪辑和视角选择，导演得以对电影时空进行独特的处理。不同视角下重复再现同一动作，叙述时间被拉长，动作时间被多次折返。有些动作被刻意放大，也有很多动作被精简到只呈现最后一击的结果。影片中不断出现的黑底红字时间与其说是为了标记时间，不如说是对时间的干扰，线性时间被一次次突然出现的黑屏打断，如同绊脚石一样，叙事被时间磕绊的踉踉跄跄。再举一个空间塑造的例子：所有人围坐在篝火前吃烤肉那一场。除了篝火和一张张被火光照亮的人物脸部特写的碎片镜头，没有任何其他空间信息。但是靠着镜头衔接和人物眼神指向，导演在一片黑暗中勾勒出了这场晚宴的座位图。
7， 构图。影片既给人静态的感觉也有强烈的运动感，运动感来自导演在追随人物视线和移动时准确使用的摇移和变焦镜头。静态画面的构图也非常精致。不让人省心的导演也毫不犹豫的使用倾斜的画面。构图的例子举不胜举，除了摒除环境的特写镜头，但凡更广阔一点的视域里，导演都用精致的构图描述人物与人物，人物与空间的关系。导演恪尽职守的用“画面”讲述着“故事”。
8， 色彩。色彩无疑给人留下了深刻印象。影片给人感觉特别假，甚至塑料感。这种假和做作的感觉很可能就是来自影片过度饱和的色彩，仿佛沃霍尔那张举世瞩目的玛丽莲梦露的肖像画。但是不要以为导演就是夸张的搞颜色的堆砌重叠，举个小例子就可以证明导演安排的有多细心。影片开篇，女画家在户外画画，光头肥男射出三发子弹，打出三个被女画家称为“太对称”的孔洞。注意这三个洞分别在打在红色、绿色、蓝色三坨色彩上。随后光头男和红裤子男离开，天台上只剩下女画家，镜头从画架上的绿色孔洞上穿出，扫过披着绿色植被的怪石荒山，扫过湛蓝的天空和大海，最后回到穿着红色裙子的女画家身上，女画家吐了口口水，用雪茄塞住了绿色孔洞。画架上的红绿蓝三原色和现实中的三原色互相照应的转了一圈，厌恶对称的女画家选择用一根雪茄终结了绿色的孔洞。对于画面、构图和色彩敏感的观众，会感受到一种似乎无因的快感。人眼最易辨别的三原色，360度旋转镜头带来的圆满构图，消灭乏味的对称，隐藏在血液深处的美学基因得到了外部世界的回应。
9， 声音。声音在影片里的作用非常重要，除了一般性的强化微小动作，营造氛围，塑造三维空间这些常规用法。尤其值得注意的是导演在什么地方选择声音和画面的点到点对称，而在哪些地方又选择了声音和画面的错位。在经典的多视角重现同一动作的场景里，声音还对观众定位时间起到了帮助作用，比如女警被一枪击中被重现了5次，是枪声和女警的惨叫提醒观众导演启用了时间循环模式。这场戏后面紧跟的两个动作也是如此模式。
10， 演员表演。除了剥夺观众的代入和共情的权利，导演也剥夺了演员的所有权利。不断重复出现的演员肢体特写，眼睛，嘴唇，手指，脚。超级大特写用它武断的景框隔绝了演员的其他肢体部分与身边环境。导演没有给演员留出任何表演的空间。
11， 关于“故事”。最后一点来讲讲故事。虽说我前面说了这是一个平庸的故事，只是被导演精彩的用画面讲述了出来，事实上，纷繁多样的画面技巧的使用也极大的丰富了故事本身。一个简单故事被改造的相应的曲折复杂。主人公是女画家。剧中人物的命运因她而改变。观众看到的是“她经历的现场”和“她的fantasy”。她的fantasy是影片中那个令人迷惑的辅线故事，无脸长发女和一群轮廓剪影无脸男，毫无疑问是女画家在另一个时空里的本尊，且承担着本片是一部色情片的职能。我对这个辅线故事的嵌入方式有点迷惑，是唯一我觉得不好解释的地方。首先是主线故事与辅线故事的关系，也就是这个fantasy与男作家和女画家的关系（这个fantasy来自男作家正在写的书？还是女画家自己的臆想），那枚巨大的绿宝石戒指的符号学意义（戒指仿佛是打开fantasy世界的钥匙，每次辅线故事都开始或结束于这枚戒指），女画家与男作家的关系 （男画家最终和家人逃脱，代价是失去了绿色石戒指，也是在暗示他整个灵感和创作能力的失去，所以意味着画家的创作胜于作家的创作，影像胜于文字？）。影片结尾以fantasy中的女画家本尊坐在摇椅上结束，虽然说不出有什么不好，但是也许结束在真实世界的短发女画家本人或者她的画作上更好？就好比交响乐，一个乐章结束在辅音上当然也不是不可以，但终归结束在主音上更令听众心满意足。
被省略的人物塑造，对现实的缺乏关照，将影像前置于故事和人物，挑战大众习惯的观看方式，这是大部分观众不喜欢这部影片的原因。一切可以帮助观众代入故事和人物，可以形成期待和解释的东西都被导演剥夺了。观众只能听凭导演强势镜头的指挥，指哪看哪。罕见，新颖，独特，叛逆，导演坚决的贯彻执行着自己的美学追求和作者意志。但是导演也绝非做了什么创新，而是从过去的电影里做了很多借鉴，形成自己独特的风格。他们是从各类“元电影”出发，从“样板”出发，将一切可用的不可用的都重新回收加以利用。他们把类型拆的碎碎的，用放大镜一般的镜头语言，剖析出来给人看。导演仿佛在玩乐高玩具，红的，绿的，方的，圆的，大块，小块，把那些碎片拼接起来看看最后是什么吧。其实最后拼出来长久保存在展示柜里的那个东西完全不重要，乐趣就在把玩那些小碎片。乐趣会在影片最后拼成的那一刻全部结束。以一种有点气人的方式，导演重新定义了电影：电影是碎片的艺术，是夸张的美学。
Title: Amer
Year: 2009
Genre: Mystery, Horror
Country: Belgium, France
Language: French
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Marie Bos
Cassandra Forêt
Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud
Biancamaria D’Amato
Harry Cleven
Jean-Michel Vovk
Rating: 5.2/10
English Title: The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
Original Title: L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps
Year: 2013
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Country: Belgium, Luxembourg, France
Language: French, Danish, Flemish
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Klaus Tange
Jean-Michel Vovk
Ursula Bedena
Anna D’Annunzio
Hans De Munter
Birgit Yew
Sam Louwyck
Manon Beuchot
Lolita Oosterlynck
Rating: 5.5/10
English Title: Let the Corpses Tan
Original Title: Laissez bronzer les cadavres
Year: 2017
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Country: Belgium, France
Language: French
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
based on the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Elina Löwensohn
Stéphane Ferrara
Hervé Sogne
Bernie Bonvoisin
Michelangelo Marchese
Pierre Nisse
Marc Barbé
Marine Sainsily
Dorylia Calmel
Marilyn Jess
Bamba Forzani Ndiaye
Aline Stevens
Rating: 5.9/10
English Title: Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Original Title: Reflet dans un diamant mort
Year: 2025
Genre: Mystery, Action, Sci-Fi
Country: Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, France
Language: French, Italian, English, German, Spanish
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Yannick Renier
Fabio Testi
Koen De Bouw
Manon Beuchot
Hervé Sogne
Maria de Medeiros
Sébastien Landry
Kezia Quintal
Aline Stevens
Sophie Mousel
Céline Camara
Thi Mai Nguyen
Steven van Hauwermeiren
Amaury Bogaerts
Olivier Bisback
Nilton Martins
Mukadi Mukendi
Frédérique Derycke
Kiluangi Wolf
Légion von Creed
Rating: 6.1/10
For over fifteen years, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, a Belgium-based, French husband-and-wife filmmakers, have remained among the most distinctive visual stylists in European cinema. Set almost entirely inside an architecturally elaborate Art Nouveau Brussels apartment building, the film follows a man (a saturnine Tangeabulary of genre filmmaking. What began as an exploration of giallo has expanded into a broader meditation on trauma, memory, eroticism and the perception of looking. Across their four features, they have refined an aesthetic that is at once sensuous, abrasive and unmistakably their own.
Cattet & Forzani’s debut feature AMER floats their cegialloartistic provocation: what happens when cinema abandons exposition and moves directly into the expressionism? The film is a three-part exploration of a woman’s life, capturing the evolution of her desires and fears with minimal dialogue and maximal sensory intensity. The film’s visual strategy - extreme close-ups, color-drenched lighting, and fetishistic attention to texture - acts as a direct descendant of Italian giallo, but stripped of any nostalgic softness and narrative cogency.
In lieu of developing a plot, the directors train their focus on the morbid allure of spook, sexual threat and slasher. Childhood curiosity slips into dread; adolescent seduction becomes a choreography of glances and gestures; adulthood is haunted by shadows that refuse to resolve into shapes. The result is a cradle-to-grave experience built from a willful arrangement of genre set pieces, and frankly, their executions are more showboating than substantial (tellingly, their guidance to the players are almost nonexistent, a lacking would persist throughout their works. Plainly, actors go through the motions like mannequins, cue by the offscreen indicators to project a particular emotion, like fear, petulance, or anxiety). AMER is a debut that draws a line: this is the cinema to be felt rather than cerebrally understood.
The duo’s follow-up, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS plunges further into the ceaselessly unresolved labyrinth. Set almost entirely inside an architecturally elaborate Art Nouveau Brussels apartment building, the film follows a man (a saturnine Tange) searching for his missing wife - a premise the directors treat less as a plot than as a psychological trigger.
Rooms fold into bizarre memories, fantasies echo into lurid, Pirandellian nightmares, and the building becomes a metaphor for the protagonist’s deteriorating sense of self, where his sanity goes off the deep end as occurrences turn exceedingly weird and illogical. Editing is used like a scalpel - cutting, repeating, fragmenting - while the soundscape magnifies every whisper, every metallic scrape, every imagined footstep behind a locked door. The duo’s interest in the threshold between perception and delusion reaches full force here. It challenges a viewer’s attention span, who, once it clocks to them that the central mystery isn’t going to be solved neatly, may struggle to retain one’s curiosity after the unrelieved fusillade of optic attack. AI seems to be a better spectator for it than us mankind.
With LET THE CORPSES TAN, Cattet & Forzani leave the claustrophobic shadows behind and step into searing Mediterranean daylight. At first glance, the film is a genre exercise: a gang of thieves, a painter with a volatile imagination, two bumbling cops, a secluded hideout, and a bloodshed is in the pipeline. It is actually based on a Jean-Patrick Manchette novel. But the directors approach pulp the way gem-cutters approach raw stone - by chiseling away until only the essential surfaces remain. It is a Spaghetti Western melted in a furnace.
Sunlight is the dominant force, bleaching the screen until everything vibrates with heat. Gunfights unfold like ritualized dances; hallucinations burst in with appealing extravagance; and the film’s pacing is governed by the rhythm of bodies, weapons and the relentless ticking of time (sometimes it boomerangs as an all-too-frequent nuisance). Underneath the stylized violence lies a pointed commentary on artistic obsession. The artist Luce (Löwensohn) presiding over the hideout treats chaos as a kind of muse, blurring the boundary between creation and destruction. It is as though the directors are reflecting on their own craft: how far can stylization go before it becomes a form of delirium? Clearly, their experimenting hasn’t reached any boundaries yet. A sunburnt western-noir hybrid sharpened to a gleaming edge, LET THE CORPSES TAN is accessible plot-wise, but the rub perdures, its allure palls quickly, when there is all style with little substance, no way a viewer can be empathetic with the goings-on, no matter how spectacularly and idiosyncratically they are executed. There is no persona, just expressive cyphers, boasting an avant-garde edge that suits better for a MV director than a feature-length filmmaker. It is a genre film without pull.
Their most recent feature, REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND, which is allotted a Chinese cinema release window (naturally, it only earns peanuts while the market is monopolized by a record-breaking ZOOTOPIA 2), marks a new phase in the duo’s evolution - one that retains their sensory intensity while deepening their thematic ambition.
The film’s protagonist is John Diman (Testi, a younger version is played by Renier), a retired intelligence operative in his seventies, dwelling in a seaside hotel on the Côte d’Azur. When his mysterious next-door neighbor disappears, Diman becomes enmeshed in another labyrinth of recollections: covert missions, betrayals, and fragments of a life spent performing heroism as though it were a role he was never quite sure he deserved.
Cattet & Forzani treat Diman’s memory as a prism. Scenes appear, fracture, and return with slight variations - as if the film itself were rearranging the pieces, searching for a version of the past that fits. Stylistically, the directors evoke the aesthetic codes of 1960s Eurospy cinema: bold colors, angular framing, expressive silhouettes. But these elements appear through the haze of age and disorientation, like memories replayed on a cracked reel. The result is a portrait of masculinity unraveling under its own myths. Diman’s remembrances are seductive and unreliable; his identity, built on half-remembered assignments, feels more constructed than lived. The “dead diamond” of the title becomes a metaphor for memory under pressure - coruscating, resistant, and ultimately opaque.
It is the duo’s most emotionally resonant work, a film about aging, performance and the uneasy space between legend and truth, also serves as a deconstruction of the cold-war secret agent mythos. And while still unmistakably Cattet & Forzani - full of tactile detail, exquisite sound design and framings sharp enough to cut glass - it demonstrates a new willingness to linger on something more personal.
Across four features, the duo’s pattern emerges: leather, sweat, metal, skin, smoke, stone - texture as storytelling; breath, echoes, mechanical hums, heightened silence - sound as emotional logic; narratives built through sensation rather than linear exposition; plus a fascination with faces and gazes - their inscrutability, seduction and inherent instability, habitually lensed through extreme close-ups. They strip the giallo genre of its "mystery" plot and leave only the raw nerve endings: the black leather gloves, the widening eyes, the sound of tearing flesh, all aided by a strobe-light palette and a rapid-fire editing rhythm (moving image in its purest form). Their films may cause vertigo, ocular stimulation, and a mortal fear of switchblades, but on the debit side, you must be a bit masochist to veritably swallow what this sui generis pair of retromeisters has been conjured, cooked and dished up.
referential entries: Jaco Van Dormael’s THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (2015, 6.8/10); Thomas Cailley’s THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (2023, 7.2/10); Peter Strickland’s BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012, 5.9/10); Lucio Fulci’s THE PSYCHIC (1977, 7.0/10); Sergio Leone’s FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965, 7.6/10).
运用大量美学艺术手法拍摄，光怪陆离、色彩缤纷，但过于抽象，故事叙述上严重缺乏实质性的表达，显得空洞无物……
以下是大致故事内容，属严重剧透：
地中海沿岸一废弃、偏僻的村子，被视为疯子的落魄的女艺术家卢斯(Luce)独居于此，经常以开晒尸派对来寻求画作艺术灵感……
作家马特·贝尼埃因与妻子闹离婚而暂居于此……一天，来了一批神秘客人，这些客人不是来开晒尸派对，而是计划劫持运钞车……
这批劫匪为首者为里诺，手下是胖子、阿莱克斯与律师布里索尔格耶。四人以假借购买食物、饮料离开村子，途中劫持了运钞车，抢夺了250公斤黄金……飞驰撤回村子途中，劫匪遇到一拦路搭车的女子，女子叫梅拉妮，带着保姆皮雅和儿子要去卢斯的住处找丈夫马特·贝尼埃。里诺无奈，只得让三人搭乘……
回到村子，律师布里索尔格耶趁里诺等人不注意，对藏有黄金的车动了手脚，准备黑吃黑，并向里诺撒谎称卢斯看到了自己向条子开枪，建议马上撤离此处，但却遭里诺的训斥……
第二天下午，两个巡警一男一女巡查到卢斯的住处，胖子一枪打瞎了女警的一只眼，随即，男警与劫匪开始了逃避与搜捕的火拼……男警察与卢斯、皮雅呆在一房间，与劫匪对持……律师带着贝尼埃，假冒是事外平民，靠近男警察寻求庇护，但狗屎的是，律师竟在旁边一直没开枪打死警察，白痴呀……
胖子冒险去捡拾金块，被警察打成筛子……为逃命，皮雅砸死了阿莱克斯，与梅拉妮、贝尼埃成功逃脱……律师醉酒对卢斯说出他欲黑吃黑而骗了里诺，于是，卢斯向里诺告密，里诺枪杀律师……
最后，里诺勉强打死了警察，而自己也因负伤过重而死。最后的赢家是落魄的女艺术家卢斯……