French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s work has often toed the line between narrative and the avant-garde, with plots that are chopped and screwed into a melee of images, sounds and music — the latter often beautifully composed by Bonello himself. His movies are less about stories than they are fleeting aesthetic experiences: what most of us retain from House of Tolerance or Saint Laurent, probably his best-known films, are the décors, the costumes and the voluptuous feeling of abandon, like an art-house interpretation of a poem by Charles Baudelaire or a novel by J-K Huysmans.
In Coma, a small-scale feature shot during, and inspired by, the recent pandemic, Bonello delivers a purely experimental work that sits close in his filmography to shorts like Cindy: The Doll is Mine or features like On War. Made up of disparate fragments that don’t entirely piece together but are rather intriguing in their own right, the film was dedicated to the director’s teenage daughter in the hopes it would pull her out of the limbo many of us have been living through these past two years.
It’s unclear whether it will actually do the trick, or whether anyone will really get what the French auteur is going for here. Still, at a succinct 80 minutes, Coma is pleasant enough to sit through if you let yourself be carried by Bonello’s unique style and Gallic brand of pessimism, which is always seductively administered. A premiere in Berlin’s Encounters section should push it towards more fests and a few niche distributors.
Bookended by two portentous montage sequences where the director offers words of promise and despair for his 19-year-old daughter, Anna, the film consists of three interlinked stories that crisscross without necessarily forming a cohesive whole.
The main one involves a teenage girl (Louise Labeque, the star of Bonello’s last feature, Zombi Child) who’s locked in her bedroom, seemingly because of Covid, and left adrift in a world of dreams, nightmares, Zoom chats and YouTube channels. The latter make up the movie’s second plotline, which follows the online videos of Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), a woman who dishes out esoteric advice for our dystopian age (she gives weather reports of extreme global warming; or explains how to use something called a “Revelator,” which is basically a pocket version of Simon Says). The third story stars the girl’s Barbie dolls in a stop-motion soap opera spoof where, at one point, Donald Trump comes into play.
Good luck making any sense of this brainstorm, though that doesn’t seem to be Bonello’s point. Rather, he uses the constraints of a pandemic-era production (closed spaces, limited cast, lots of screens) to give free reign to his fantasies and fears, channeling them through the young girl’s dark thoughts and macabre reveries. A recurring nightmare involves her wandering terrified through the woods in what looks like the backdrop of a George Romero movie. Another sequence has her and her besties video chatting about their favorite serial killers (Ed Kemper and Ted Bundy seem to get the most likes), until a scene straight out of Unfriended takes place.
Although the director ends his treatise with a mixed message of hope — “a new day will dawn soon my love,” he tells his daughter, over images of natural disasters — his film is mostly a doomsday collage about the bizarre shut-in lives we have all been leading, and hopefully won’t be leading anymore by the time Coma finally comes out.
Bonello’s superb technical skills haven’t been eroded by all the lockdowns, and the film’s elegant cinematography (by Antoine Parouty, Adolescents) and production design (by Gaston Porterjoie, Daphné Yvon and Anna Bonello) make strong use of the confined settings, as well as the screen-within-a-screen dynamic. The director’s own score mixes smooth electro beats with ominous notes straight out of a horror flick.
The Barbie scenes were voiced by a who’s who of French arthouse actors, including Louis Garrel, Vincent Lacoste, Laetitia Casta and the late, great Gaspard Ulliel.
Director, screenplay, music: Bertrand Bonello
Cast: Louise Labeque, Julia Faure
Producers: Justin Taurand, Bertrand Bonello
Cinematography: Antoine Parouty
Production design: Gaston Portejoie, Daphné Yvon, Anna Bonello
Costume design: Pauline Jacquard
Editing: Gabrielle Stemmer
Sound: Romain Cadilhac, Clément Laforce, Jean-Pierre Laforce
Production companies: Les films du Bélier, My New Picture (France)
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Encounters)
In French
80 minutes
