Let the Corpses Tan

 

Let the Corpses Tan is a 2018 French film based on a crime novel by the French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-95), who has been repopularized in the U.S. recently, at least among literary and leftist political folks, by the release of a number of his books in translation by New York Review Books.

Manchette’s tightly-presented, crisp noir crime plots and characters filled with various clashing political ideologies usually feature a radical leftist political content that is at the same time subjected to Manchette’s ironic, even cynical (which is part of the fun) presentation of leftist political futility. The portrayal of radical left political criminals drowning themselves in the absurd confusions of French society in the 60s and 70s and forward seems to have a lot of appeal for those who feel stuck these days in the political dead ends of current U.S. culture.

Let the Corpses Tan presents a series of remarkably vivid and unique images and sounds in its presentation of a gang of murderers and bank robbers who find themselves increasingly trapped by some combination of bad luck, armed police response, and their own duplicity. In fact in some ways the film is best understood as a series of cool effects. Image by image, sound by sound, the narrative shows the members of the gang spiraling down, even with occasional victories, into their own bad dreams and bad ends. The constantly violent and sexually-charged images give the movie some combination of repellant attraction in nearly every frame, although it’s not necessarily the violence that’s repellant and the sexuality that’s attractive.

What’s missing is, unfortunately, much of any kind of politics, beyond the brief mention that these murdering thieves hate cops and have a lawyer with them who’s a thief too but playing both sides of the law. The various kinds of geographical images shown throughout the film might suggest that the characters are trapped not only by the landscape but by a set of social ideologies that they’re squirming inside, unable to get themselves free of, but whatever ideologies those might be, they never prove especially relevant to the action.

In terms of social content, the film reminded me most maybe of Reservoir Dogs, in which the layers of cynicism and violence reduce the identities of the characters to mere functions of their own violence. There are no real people in Let the Corpses Tan. The men are all assholes crazed by their urges for money or sex or both, and stuck in a situation they can’t escape, and the women are stuck with them. The whole thing is going to explode in one hail of gunfire after another. People are character-less pawns of their own duplicity. That might be a point worthy of Manchette’s writing and social attitudes, some might say. But the lack of any significant political or social framework, or much in the way of interesting character dynamics, leaves the movie as a kind of detached exercise in watching human ants get crushed in a maze of their own good-looking but nearly personality-free violence. I bet the crazy images and sounds sure are cool on a big screen though.