Recensioni de* critic*

While adapting Jean-Patrick Manchette novels for the screen is as inevitable as it is desirable, this one seems to exist only as a music video for Ennio Morricone’s score. As a music video, it’s a shocker but too long. As a feature film, it’s pointless and repetitive, especially the squeaking-leather-pants sound effect that recurs over and over again.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan is a film about sensations, derived more so from the mechanics of filmmaking than from storytelling.

The resulting movie is clearly meant to evoke the kind of Italian popular film called giallo (often thrillers or horror films in an extreme key), except that these directors are so in love with their own image-making that there’s no room for the viewer.

The film is less about sense than effect—and the particular effect that Corpses aims for is a consistent, indeed relentless series of aesthetic gut punches.

Riffing on 1970s-era Italian crime films, Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.

Even the carefully selected Corsican setting of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres, 2017) struggles to compete with the landscape of actor Elina Löwensohn’s face, a filmic space where accrued time is powerfully represented.

Astonishingly faithful to its source although spiced with select and salient changes, Cattet and Forzani's Laissez bronzer les cadavres may come to be recognized as one of the best and most original literary adaptations in decades, even as it is an astonishingly cinematic experience. Relentlessly driven onward by Manchette-Bastid's clockwork setup, the film nevertheless feels operatic in its exuberant succession of extravagant and exquisite images.

With its Leone-style extreme close-ups and Godardian juxtapositions, this is a lurid bloodbath especially designed for the cinephile. But Forzani and Cattet offer more than empty homage – their artful and thrilling genre deconstructions make apparent the influences that other crime films work to bury.

The movie is calibrated for maximum outrageousness. It filters relentless gunplay through sexually explicit dream sequences that split the difference between hallucination and exploitation, straddling the line between they-don't-make-em-like-this-anymore and you've-never-seen-anything-like-this-before... At times, the sensory assault can be hard to take (or maybe to take seriously), but these filmmakers know their crowd and do everything they can to please them.

Shot on Super 16 CinemaScope in deliciously lurid colour by Manu Dacosse, backed by old music cues by Ennio Morricone (who else?) and featuring a sound design heavy on panting, scrunched leather, and the click-clack cocking of firearms, Let the Corpses Tan transforms genre pulp into pop art, keeping fetishism intact and frequently erupting into abstraction.

Stylish swagger goes full-tilt boogie in Let the Corpses Tan, the latest delirious exercise in lovingly retro pastiche from Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Having amassed a devoted cult following with luridly horror-flavored Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, the duo now adapt an influential 1971 French novel. The result is a spectacularly assaultive, borderline incoherent neo-Western that will recruit few new converts but is also guaranteed to leave no spectator indifferent.