Summary:
Thieves with a trunkful of gold bullion hide out at an old mission where they encounter a bohemian artist and his muse. As cops arrive at the mission, bullets begin to fly.
My Thoughts:
Dang. Can we get some more arthouse action movies like this, please? This movie was a freaking blast.
“Let the Corpses Tan” is a highly stylized neo-spaghetti western (complete with a Morricone score!), and for all I know it’s a pioneer in it’s genre, because I’ve never seen anything like this: it’s exciting, sometimes intense, and undeniably weird. To be fair, the weirdness in this movie works wonders up to a point, but there are other moments where I had no idea what the hell was going on, because (dare I say it, and risk angering the cinephiles?) the film was a bit too stylized at times, particularly when it came to the frenetically paced editing during the shootouts, and the rapid back and forth flitting between time. Still, if you’ve got a smidge of patience and a bit of imagination, you can totally understand what the directors are getting at, even if they are showing the audience a fully nude woman whose been painted gold and is peeing on a man’s head whose been buried up to his neck.
It makes sense, trust me; you’ve just got to work with the movie.
“Don’t you like gunshots before breakfast?”
In a sense, this is a very straightforward movie, it’s in the editing and the dream/fantasy sequences where the film gets a touch weird and difficult to follow (though, again, if you just let what happens happen, you’ll be bound to figure out what’s going on in a few minutes- you might be lost for a moment, but it’ll come around). The plot revolves around thieves with a trunkful of gold bullion showing up at an old mission and running into a bohemian artist and his muse, and, shortly after, policemen show up as well. Soon, the bullets start to fly and those who are at this mission are locked in a shootout to the death.
So, style is the name of the game in this movie. It’s so stylish that, at times, it becomes annoying, but when it hits its style in stride, it’s a thing to watch. The cuts are quick, and jump back and forth in the timeline, making the pacing both snappy and, admittedly, a bit difficult to follow- it’s like watching a fight from a space placed outside of time. You get to perceive everyone’s perspective in real time, and the actual timing of the fight scene doesn’t matter, because you’re constantly jumping back and forth and understanding new things about the fight and how it’s unfolding. The first time we see a shootout, a cop is shot in the face- and that scene is shown from four or five different perspectives, and it takes us about five to ten minutes of the runtime to move beyond what would be, in real time (ie- in the real world where the fight is actually happening) probably thirty seconds past the cop getting shot in the face. The camera just jumps all over the mission so that we know what every character is doing and how they react. It’s both frenetic and a bit difficult to get used to, but by the second fight scene I was more than onboard with what was happening.
The cinematography mimics many spaghetti westerns, particularly Leone’s (of course, what spaghetti western doesn’t draw comparison to Leone?). Wide shots are often incredibly wide; one moment gives us a literal birds-eye view (or gods eye, depending on how you want to look at the golden woman), and show multiple things going on simultaneously. But those wide shots are complimented by more intense close ups of faces than Bergman has in “Persona” (maybe a slight exaggeration).
One thing that really grabbed my attention was the sound design, which was, again, heavily stylized. Every single motion onscreen seems to have a sound, whether it be creaking leather when someone moves their gloves, a whisper of fabric as they point somewhere, even a slight slither sound when someone turns their neck to look somewhere. The result is pretty cool; it feels as if everything is hyper-amplified in this world, and, of course, the editing and cinematography help to make the sound design pop even more.
Verdict:
I really did enjoy this film, though, as I mentioned above, it is a bit difficult to follow at times (particularly with the nude woman- I took her to be a representation of fortune, or a goddess of fortune; she blesseth and she taketh away). If you take the movie in stride and just realize it’s just a daylong shootout, then you’ll probably have a good time watching it. I honestly can’t wait to see something else from Cattet and Forzani.
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