Let the Corpses Tan

Name: Let the Corpses Tan
Genre: Thriller
Released: August 31, 2018
Duration: 92 min
Rating: 62
Cast: Aline Stevens, Bernie Bonvoisin, Dorylia Calmel, Elina Löwensohn, Hervé Sogne

2018

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Generally favorable reviews based on 17 Critics

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Generally favorable reviews based on 4 Ratings

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7.5	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 4 Ratings

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Let The Corpses Tan

Movie Details & Credits

Not Rated

Kino Lorber | Release Date: August 31, 2018

Starring: Aline Stevens, Bernie Bonvoisin, Dorylia Calmel, Elina Löwensohn, Hervé Sogne, Marc Barbé, Marine Sainsily, Michelangelo Marchese, Pierre Nisse, Stéphane Ferrara

Summary: After stealing a truckload of gold bars, a gang of thieves absconds to the ruins of a remote village perched on the cliffs of the Mediterranean. Home to a reclusive yet hypersexual artist and her motley crew of family and admirers, it seems like a perfect hideout. But when two cops roll up on motorcycles to investigate, the hamlet eruptsAfter stealing a truckload of gold bars, a gang of thieves absconds to the ruins of a remote village perched on the cliffs of the Mediterranean. Home to a reclusive yet hypersexual artist and her motley crew of family and admirers, it seems like a perfect hideout. But when two cops roll up on motorcycles to investigate, the hamlet erupts into a hallucinatory battlefield as both sides engage in an all-day, all-night firefight rife with double-crosses and dripping with blood. [Kino Lorber]… Expand

Director: Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet

Genre(s): Thriller

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 92 min

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Critic Reviews

TheWrap - William Bibbiani

Aug 31, 2018

Let the Corpses Tan is high-octane high art. It’s incredibly violent. It’s unexpectedly playful. It’s strikingly sumptuous. And its depths could easily be mistaken for shallow stylistic overtures. But if you examine the surface more closely, you’ll discover it’s impressively smart. It may be one of the most rapturous movies of its kind. Read full review

Village Voice - April Wolfe

Aug 30, 2018

More times than I could count I had no idea what the hell was happening, and also just didn’t care that I didn’t know. Let the Corpses Tan is that strange and beautiful. Read full review

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) - Mark Medley

Aug 30, 2018

It’s a profoundly weird film but hypnotic nonetheless. Read full review

We Got This Covered - Matt Donato

Aug 30, 2018

Let The Corpses Tan is a stunning display of visual seduction and slaughter-first gunplay, if not somewhat distracted by a skeletal script that’s been stripped of all meatiness. Read full review

Uproxx - Vince Mancini

Aug 30, 2018

Gleefully crafted and full of memorable shots. Read full review

The Hollywood Reporter - Neil Young

Aug 30, 2018

Indeed, the picture works best when it eschews dialogue and plot altogether and the lush musical elements combine with the intense hues of Manu Dacosse's 16mm-shot visuals to stimulatingly trippy effect. Read full review

San Francisco Chronicle - G. Allen Johnson

Sep 6, 2018

The already confusing story loses all hope of clarity as day turns to night — the second half of the movie is in near-darkness, making even the stylish visuals hard to decipher. What little interest you have in the characters is effectively extinguished as well. Read full review

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CityOfGeek

Dec 9, 2018

I received my crash-course intro to the work of Belgian filmmakers Hèléne Cattet and Bruno Forzani way back in 2010, when Amer, their feature debut, played the Seattle International Film Festival.

The movie galvanized the small crowd of critics clustered in the Pacific Place theater for theI received my crash-course intro to the work of Belgian filmmakers Hèléne Cattet and Bruno Forzani way back in 2010, when Amer, their feature debut, played the Seattle International Film Festival.

The movie galvanized the small crowd of critics clustered in the Pacific Place theater for the press preview. A lot of them hated it, deriding it as an exercise of style over substance. Me, I was captivated.

The haters missed one key point. Cattet/Forzani films are indeed exercises in style, but it’s not style-over-substance. In the pocket universe created by this filmmaking couple, the style is the substance.

Cattet and Forzani craft elevated genre flicks that take formula pulp cinema, then twist it around like kaleidoscopic taffy. Their outrageously colorful and utterly arresting visual style is not meant to drive forward a linear narrative. It is a cinema of pure sensory exploration and indulgence; precision-engineered yet passionately crafted, designed to stimulate the senses and to evoke emotion on a near-subconscious level.
For Amer and The Strange Colour of your Body’s Tears (their 2013 followup), Cattet and Forzani homaged that hotbed of fevered sexuality, artfully bloody violence, and outrageous visual dazzle known as Italian Giallo cinema. In the process, the duo pulled off a redefinition of the Giallo that’s spiritually akin to Quentin Tarantino’s redefinition of war movies with Inglourious Basterds–genre cinema that morphs formula tropes into its own repurposed, joyously anarchic art form.

Let the Corpses Tan finds the directorial pair casting their genre net in a slightly different direction while still playing to their strengths. This time, the launch points are spaghetti westerns and the hyper-violent, gritty Italian crime dramas that flourished throughout Europe in the 1960s and ’70s (they’re known as Poliziotteschi, if you’re interested in diving down that particular rabbit hole).
The script, adapted from an influential pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid, serves up a time-tested crime-movie setup. A trio of career criminals steal a huge crate of gold bricks and are forced to retreat to an abandoned, unnamed Mediterranean village inhabited by cynical, charismatic artist Luce (Elina Löwensohn). A small group of innocent bystanders wind up joining Luce and her compatriots in the crossfire as two cops (Hervé Sogne and Dominique Troyes) stumble into the scene.

Corpses does sport a few markers of linearity throughout. Stark red-on-black time stamps ostensibly mark the sequence of events. A great retro soundtrack (largely cherry-picked from vintage Ennio Morricone) further adds to the bleached, delirious atmosphere. There are plenty of wonderfully-executed shootouts and vehicle chases woven into the film, and the colorful cast of characters is more defined than those that inhabit other Cattet/Forzani films.

But even those touchstones are played with and subverted in fever-dream fashion. The time stamps allow the directors to rewind situations many times over, with the exact same moment playing out from several characters’ viewpoints a la Rashomon. Cattet and Forzani have also populated Corpses with a bunch of wonderfully distinctive actors blessed with fascinating, flawed features, but the directors are more interested in representing their characters’ moods with vivid visual brushstrokes than with forward-momentum exposition and character development.
Cattet, Forzani, and cinematographer Manuel Dacosse explore the landscape, the sun-blasted village ruins, inanimate objects, and the actors’ faces and bodies with fetishistic fervor. Surreal, symbolic visual tangents assert themselves into the action, jolting audience perception with the abruptness of involuntary acid flashbacks. The great sound mix also turns simple noises like the cocking of a pistol, or the dry creak of a police officer’s leather jacket, into vivid sensory cues in their own right.

There’s plenty of gunplay and blood, but characters don’t just get shot to death in this movie: Some of their demises are represented by bullets gliding through viscous oceans of gold liquid that kick up glitter in slow motion just before characters breathe their last. The impressionistic edits, and the vivid visual sense, summon forth Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and Mario Bava, all with a splash of pop-art surrealism.

It’s the kind of pure visual cinema that’ll either mesmerize or exasperate you, depending on your mood. And admittedly, there are points where the relentless energy and style-to-burn are damn near exhausting. But at its best (which is a good 90% of its run time, by my count), Let the Corpses Tan is exhilarating–the sight and sound of two filmmakers pushing genre cinema into a brave, eye-popping new world. Turn off your practical mind, open your eyes and ears, strap yourself in, and drink deep.… Expand

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DirigiblePulp

Jan 12, 2019

It was an absolute joy, visually and aurally, to see one of Cattet and Forzani's films on the big screen proper. Unfortunately, this one felt their least essential. It is, at times, almost a parody of their previous work, lacking innovation and evolution from what they've done previously.

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