colinr0380 wrote:
The next film from Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, directors of very 70s giallo-styled horror films Amer and The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears has been released. The
gunshot teaser trailer (continuing a trend from the gunshot teaser from
The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears) and
the full trailer for Let The Corpses Tan suggest that this will be also be 70s inflected, but in a crime thriller or perhaps modern western genre. Though it looks like there will still be black gloved killers in there! It apparently has also got Elina Löwensohn (who played the title character in the classic 1990s vampire film, Nadja) in the cast too.
Jean-Patrick Manchette has been woefully treated by filmmakers so far, so this looks a promising improvement. Alain Delon made a couple of half-hearted thrillers, obviously stripped of their novels' Marxist bents, and Sean Penn utterly ruined The Prone Gunman with his need to be Sean Penn. Cattet and Forzani seem a better fit, aesthetically at least. Interesting giallo/spaghetti western mashup vibe in the trailers.
There are four Manchettes in English translation, mostly later works. All worth looking up. His books were slim and vicious and possessed of that weird Gallic streak that Simenon and Dard and Jonquet have. Serpent's Tail and NYRB cover the four between them - The Prone Gunman, Fatale, Three To Kill, and The Mad and the Bad (an oddly bland title compared the French
Ô dingos, ô châteaux, a play on the Rimbaud, and I suppose a reference to RD Laing, but it comes off like the name a daytime soap set in fifties Hollywood. Cuckoos and Castles might have been spiritually more apt, though lacking in poetical détournement). His unfinished final work is coming in translation. Hopefully this film prompts a translation of the novel.