Laissez bronzer les cadavres

LET THE CORPSES TAN (LAISSEZ BRONZER LES CADAVRES!): A pretty good shootout thriller which is a bit messed up by philosophical and avant garde pretensions in fantasy sequences (some may be memories) and stilted dialogue. They don't quite negate the negation but might have negated the the film. Fortunately the action shots triumph over the postmodernist pisstakes to acheive a satisfactory synthesis.

An artist and a novelist are living in a series of ruins on a hilltop in the South of France, their lawyer arrives but has made a pact with a gang of Gold Bullion robbers to use the abode as a hideout. Meanwhile the author's wife arrives with her maid and a child (snatched) from a previous realtionship. Actually the robbers meet them by the hitching and give them a lift. Motorcycle cops investigating both the robbery and child abduction come to the ruins.

A many sided battle ensues with shifting allegiances taking place. This is very much a homage to/pastiche of the exploitation euro-Gangster films of the 1970's but is weakened by (imho) unnecessary psychedelic additions. The only effects I really appreciated was the effect of the Gold on the crooks, their faces tanned with avarice as they gazed on the bullion. Reminiscent of scenes from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. Some really savage and bloody scenes.

Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani with the assistance of novelist Jean-Pierre Bastid on the screenplay would have delivered a pretty good thriller if they'd left out or toned down the biarrare elements. 6.5/10

The concept is simple: a gang of criminals stay at the isolated hideaway of an eccentric artist and her lover after stealing 250 kilos of gold. Shenanigans ensue. And they ensue quite strangely.

This is a psychosexual surrealist film disguised as a spaghetti western. Many are judging this strictly in its capacity as a spaghetti western, claiming that the strange, surreal scenes were merely a waste of time. If anything, the opposite is true. The power dynamics, back-stabbing, and fights for survival are secondary to this film's main goal, which seems to be as follows: to show (as stylishly and creatively as possible) these characters' darkest impulses and fantasies. Very similar to their last work, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani place equal importance upon what's going on in the "reality" of the film and what's going on inside the characters' heads. One character's overwhelming and confounding sexual fantasy might be given just as much dramatic weight and screen-time as another character shifting their allegiance or being killed, despite the fact that one of these scenes makes sense in the context of the plot and the other does not. This feels less like watching a spaghetti western than it does like watching a nightmarish wet dream of someone who had seen a spaghetti western the night before.

The nature of this film makes it difficult to give it a rating. The mish-mosh of high-brow and low-brow elements makes it very hard to compare to any other films. Yes, people always compare this directing duo to Argento, but their obsessive need to explore the subconscious fantasies of their characters is vastly different than any of Argento's work. Their films take place maybe 80% in the characters' heads whereas Argento's films usually take place firmly in reality (albeit, a strange, uniquely lit reality). All in all, I would give it an 8/10, and that rating is hard-earned through ingenuity alone. The characters can barely be called archetypes, there's no one to sympathize with, you barely know anything about any of the characters save for the most banal backstories, the plot isn't given much attention, and there seem to be major moments that are oddly glossed over. Instead of focusing on all these elements that would make a movie "good" in a traditional sense, Cattet and Forzani dive deep into a sexual dreamland of violence and fantasy and do so with constant and I mean CONSTANT creativity.

Almost every single scene is filmed in a way that feels enchantingly fresh. Since it pulls heavily from the spaghetti western genre (a genre that I adore, but has been done into the ground, then spoofed into the ground, then tributed into the ground), there are scene types that we've all watched a thousand times before. Predictable moments that you'd expect to be filmed in a cookie cutter fashion. Instead, each scene is treated like a feverish, experimental short film designed to get the general gist of plot details across, but, much more importantly, utterly enrapture its audience with shockingly gorgeous cinematography, mind-bending editing, and sound design that will have you weeping with joy, all to communicate a sense of otherworldly, darkly violent sexual tension. Admittedly, for every experimental scene that works, there's one that doesn't, but because of the sheer quantity of risks this film is willing to take, the missteps are more than forgivable. I found myself thinking of Hausu while watching it, another film where at one moment I would say to myself, "Why would they film it like this...?" and in the next, "I don't know. But I love it." This is the result of two filmmakers having unabashed fun with their medium and I personally found their subversive glee to be infectious. If you want to see a traditional, Oscar-ready thriller...avoid this one. But if you want to see a whacky fun-house of experimental style, go get your ticket now.

All style, no substance. It's extremely hard to follow after the setup establishes the theft of gold bullion, with some of the worst storytelling and worst character development I've ever seen. We never learn anything about these people, and have little idea who's shooting who over most of the film; meanwhile the directors give us pointless cuts back in time which add nothing, and the film quickly descends into unexplained scenes of sex, violence, crucifixion, and urination. This dreamy/nightmarish style leads to interesting imagery at times and the scenery in the ruins overlooking the azure waters of Corsica is striking, but mostly the film is an exercise in wild surrealism and a mashup of old film references that was more frustrating than compelling, at least for me.

A road gang hijacks a gold shipment, kills the driver and escorts, then hides out at a picturesque seaside retreat occupied by an artist and her retinue.

More unexpected and unwanted visitors arrive. So do the cops. Much gunfire, double dealing, and bloodshed occur along with weird and surreal erotic dreams interspersed with action.

That's the movie in a nutshell. What propels it far beyond the blood-and-gore 70s Italian exploitation flicks it seems to emulate is everything else: photography, acting, editing, sound (someone obviously has a fetish for creaking leather clothing), and scenery.

Ah, the scenery! A crumbling seaside Mediterranean cluster of decrepit interconnected walls and broken down church are so much a part of the action one can almost imagine them taking cues from the director.

It doesn't always make sense. This is partly due to sparse subtitling (it's in French) and partly to the simple fact that at times it's almost impossible to keep track of who are the "good" guys and who are the "bad" guys. (Not that it makes a difference!)

But cinematically this film is a real hoot especially if you enjoy occasional off-the-wall movie nonsense produced to sound and look like High Art despite the underlying tenuous threads of a plot.

Recommended. Sort of.

First, let me tell you that I highly liked the Jean Patrick Manchette's novel which this film is based on, and written and - or - produced by Doug headline - Manchette's son. That said, this film is faithful to the novel written back in 1971. At least if you consider the narrative ark, the basic scheme. This book from 1971 was a turn in the French crime novels history; it was one of the last French crime novels where it was question of gangsters, bank robbers and so on, which was a topic usually spoken about since the fifties and Auguste Le Breton, José Giovanni and so on...After this novel it was the beginning of the post May 68 era and the rise of the "subversive" crime novels, inspired by extreme left winged ideas and topics, stories highly against the establishment and political power. Manchette was the master in this field. He opened the road. Back to this film, it is faithful to the book BUT the aesthetic aspect is too much hysterical, totally crazy. NOT FOR ME. Most of the scenes are unexplained, absolutely senseless, you wonder where the screenplay drives at. This was unbearable for me. Sorry. I won't say that's a crap movie. No, but simply not for my taste. But I am aware that this feature is a big tribute to the sixties ear and the spaghetti western in particular. I won't even mention the Ennion Morricone like score. This movie seems most of the time boring. I nearly fell asleep at some times. I deserves although to be seen. The armored truck heist sequence is also a tribute, but to Jean Pierre Melville's masterpiece THE SECOND BREATHE, in the heist attack scene, on the lost sea side mountain road.

This movie is like a pasta dish, with or without red pepper. It could have been told in a raw way, without all those artifices. But maybe some audiences could have found this tasteless. So they used this camera eccentricities.

See for yourself.