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).
可是此片给人的感官上的刺激是无与伦比的，我不知道B级片的归类标准，也不懂什么剧情安排。可是看电影，听音乐，不一定是非要看出个具体的故事吧。就像音乐，不一定非要有歌词，有含义，轻音乐或者techno一样可以给人安慰和感动。此片就像是没有歌词的ambient音乐，给人的是最生理又最感性的刺激，没有对白，没有故事，只有记忆的碎片。此片如此懒惰，如此随性，却也饱含着真挚和纯洁。相较有些讲故事讲不好的电影，此片不是要真挚的更多吗？
最后是自己的体会：童年，最可怕。
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).
影片分别截取了女人童年，少年，青年的三个片段，并将其展开。三个片段之间可以说是毫无联系，不仅仅是内容和叙事，影片类型也不一样（如果硬要归类的话)。童年片段可以看成是恐怖片的范本，很多元素单独拿出来放在别的恐怖片中，效果都会非常的赞。少年片段是最好的情色片。女孩光滑裸露的皮肤，红润丰满的嘴唇，飘起的裙角，男人的眼睛，上下颤动的喉结，喘息声，女孩被风吹起的发丝，男人满是胡渣的脸，流汗肮脏的手，女孩若隐若现的大腿根部，男人毛发旺盛粗壮的躯干……蒙太奇令性的暗示相当的明显。成年片段显然成了惊悚片了。女人回到小时候所住的大宅子，杀死一个男人，被一个男人杀死，然后又复活？（最后一个镜头止于她睁开眼睛的那一刹那间）。结尾类似分尸的那里看得鸡皮都起来了。
虽然不能强求片子的叙事性，可我有一种感觉：单独看其中任何一个片段，效果都很好，但三个片段连起来，作为一部电影本身，呈现出来的感觉却大打折扣了。就好比有人五官平平，组合起来看却觉得很美，而有人五官单独看都属于漂亮的范畴，但整张脸看起来总透露着说不出来的怪异和不和谐。就是这种感觉。
值得一提的是，从童年到少年过渡以及少年期刚开始的那一组镜头，非常的漂亮。本片的摄影、剪辑、音乐以及三个女演员都很好。个人最喜欢少年那一段，只需要加强叙事，再想一个好一点的故事，完全就可以拍出一部类似LOLITA之类的电影了。总之，对于我来说，与其把它看成是一部电影，还不如把它看成是一系列B级片的优秀素材组合，那样感觉会更好些。
⭐ ◀ ▶ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐nn朦朧、扭曲、破碎 ～ 承襲「鉛黃電影（giallo）」別具一格的「美學影調」、「視覺符號」與「心理意涵」，通過【Ana】的三段人生時期：兒童（啟蒙）期、少女（「覺醒）期、成年（自我異化與毀滅）期為脈絡，從一種持續且無形的「男凝（剝削）」與「母權（規訓）」切入來探索、構築【Ana】主觀（潛意識）世界裡對「性」與「死亡」終其一生的「恐懼」、「壓抑」與「反抗」！電影以一定「實驗性質」的「視覺外殼」來構築其曖昧的「情緒內竅」，「畫面（視覺）」與「聲音（聽覺）」成為電影的絕對核心，每一格畫面極致風格化、碎片化、情緒化、夢幻化，其對「特寫（微觀）」的極盡運用與堆砌已經達到了「走火入魔」的程度，時而失焦、時而跳切、時而畸變，滿賦「官能誘惑」與「感官沖擊」，幾近達成一種純粹的「超現實知覺奇觀」：唇、齒、眼、眉、膚髮，順著乳房滑落的汗珠，隨風搖曳的裙擺，嘴角的一撮秀髮，劃過肌膚的帶刺荊棘，從舌尖捋過的梳子 … 滿溢「慾望」，極具「張力」，卻盡顯「克製」，滿是「挑逗」！「男性凝視（窺視）」的本質，於此具象化為「身體恐怖」與「心理驚悚」的直接體現：「Ana 2」中的皮靴機車幫、「Ana 3」中出租車司機 … 這份「恐懼」，源於「慾望」本能，也源於「死亡」威脅，【Ana】的一生始終處於「迷茫」的邊緣，這種傷害（「性化」與「物化」）似「夢魘」如影隨形，緊緊糾纏，從未消散 … 即便是她「死亡（停屍間）」之際！nn???? Amer ????nnHélène Cattet（伊蓮娜·卡泰特） ★ 女 ★ 法國 ???? 33 NnnBruno Forzani（布魯諾·福紮尼） ★ 男 ★ 法國 ???? 33 Nnn???? 2009 ???? 比利時 X 法國nn???? 2025 ▲ 11月 9日 ???? ➊ ???? 26nn???? 本地 觀影 ???? 55 inchnn???? Ⅰ ≈ 90 分鐘nn???? 原聲音軌 ★ 中文字幕