Let the Corpses Tan

The Belgian filmmaking team of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are carving a distinctive and specialized career melding stylized art movies with flamboyant genre films drawn from Italian exploitation movies. Let the Corpses Tan turns an adaptation of a 1971 cult pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid into a tribute to the poliziotteschi (the violent Italian cop and gangster movies of the 1970s) with flourishes from spaghetti Westerns, Italian horror films, and even Japanese pop-art spy and crime movies. A violent gang robs an armored car and hides out in the ruins of a mountain villa that is occupied by an eccentric artist (Elina Löwensohn), a tired novelist, and a scheming lawyer. The police stumble across their hideout and the shooting begins, igniting a siege that soon sets the criminals against one another as well. The whole thing has the quality of a dream, complete with lurid visions that haunt multiple members of the gang. Much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, creating a sense of abstraction and dislocation as the big picture is slowly pieced together like a puzzle (with the narrative jumping forward and backward in time to offer alternate perspectives on the same scene). All of this makes the intertwining storylines, unexpected alliances, and conflicts in the chaos hard to follow but does give the action a riveting immediacy and stylistic excitement. Likely to appeal to fans of cult movies and stylized foreign cinema, this is a strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)