Let the Corpses Tan

2018 neo-Spaghetti Western

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Gold thieves hunker down at the run-down residence of an artist, and bullets start flying once the police arrive.

In the past, I've pretended to be critical of style-over-substance movies. With the work of Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the duo behind The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, I probably have to stop pretending and just admit that I don't need things like cohesive narratives, solid character development, or rich themes to fall for a movie.

Like Strange Color, this confused me a little. I had trouble understanding the motivations of some of these characters, and to be honest, I had a difficult time even remembering who some of these characters were halfway through this. The main sources of conflict are easy enough to understand, an overall arch that has to do with greed or lust, but individual pieces of the story are befuddling. Unless your smarter than this viewer, you'll be asking yourself "Why is so-and-so doing that?" or "What exactly is their plan here?" or "Why don't they just do such-and-such?" or "Who the hell is that person again?" throughout this.

None of it matters as every single visual and aural decision feels so inspired. There's barely a second of this that isn't fascinating because of what's going in your eye and ear holes. Initially, I wondered if Cattet and Forzani could keep this hallucinatory fever dream pace for the duration of a feature length movie and whether or not it would grow tiresome. Their bag of visual tricks, however, is huge, and they pull all sorts of things that, if I've seen them before, I've never seen compiled into a single piece of art like this. A lot of it recalls old spaghetti westerns. Imagine those kinds of shots and quick zooms and camera movements or the amplified sound effects that make a spaghetti western a spaghetti western. Do you have that in your head? Now imagine 90 minutes of that. You've got a sense of what Let the Corpses Tan looks and sounds like. It's very exciting.

The pair definitely take some narrative chances that, depending on the viewer, may or may not work. There are time jumps, the same events seen from multiple perspectives, flashbacks or fantasy sequences that are thrown at you without warning, and the pretentious use of ants. It's all going to rub a lot of people the wrong way, and chances are that a large percentage of anybody reading this nonsense will think that this movie is nonsense. It's an intense experience, something that my computer seemed to realize as technical difficulties gave me a few breaks from the onslaught of challenging visuals.

I'm not going to say anything about the dopey title.