The directors of Let The Corpses Tan -- Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani -- are more preoccupied with arty shots, clever editing, moments of surreality, and fancy camerawork than in telling a decent story. It's as though the film-makers crawled inside my head, discovered everything I hate about arthouse cinema, and put it all into this one movie. At times, the pretentiousness is so extreme that it feels like a pastiche of arthouse, although I'm fairly certain that this is not the case: no-one in their right mind would waste the time, money and effort to do that.
At the core of the film is a classic 'heist gone wrong' scenario, a group of armed robbers making their way to a remote hideout after stealing a fortune in gold bullion, where greed, betrayal and a stubborn cop causes problems. Many a great film has been made with similar material, but Cattet and Forzani's showy treatment and extremely offbeat visuals make this a totally confusing chore from start to finish. There are lots of close-ups of eyes and gun barrels, annoying out of sequence scenes and multiple different viewpoints of the same action, plus tons of bizarre moments that are never explained: ants crawling on an aerial photo of the hideout, a silhouetted naked woman who pees on a man's head, a lady having her dress machine-gunned off, and gold that turns into liquid when hit by bullets. The last half an hour or so consists of choppily edited gunfire, all shot so as to make it impossible to work out who is firing at who.
1/10. Hifalutin drivel of the worst kind.
At the core of the film is a classic 'heist gone wrong' scenario, a group of armed robbers making their way to a remote hideout after stealing a fortune in gold bullion, where greed, betrayal and a stubborn cop causes problems. Many a great film has been made with similar material, but Cattet and Forzani's showy treatment and extremely offbeat visuals make this a totally confusing chore from start to finish. There are lots of close-ups of eyes and gun barrels, annoying out of sequence scenes and multiple different viewpoints of the same action, plus tons of bizarre moments that are never explained: ants crawling on an aerial photo of the hideout, a silhouetted naked woman who pees on a man's head, a lady having her dress machine-gunned off, and gold that turns into liquid when hit by bullets. The last half an hour or so consists of choppily edited gunfire, all shot so as to make it impossible to work out who is firing at who.
1/10. Hifalutin drivel of the worst kind.