A legendary warrior queen looks back on a decadent life of blood-soaked barbarism and romantic tragedy in Conann, the third full-length feature from prolific shorts director Bertrand Mandico.
Following The Wild Boys (2017) and After Blue (2021), the uncompromising French auteur’s latest phantasmagorical long-form experiment features many of his regular players and stylistic tropes: heavily theatrical setting, heightened poetic dialogue, and overt nods to Fassbinder and Burroughs, all performed by a mostly female cast in both male and female roles. Launched in Cannes, this gender-fluid queer-punk fantasia screens at Locarno Film Festival later this week alongside the thematically related world premiere of Mandico’s latest short, We The Barbarians.
Mandico’s lurid demi-monde of high-art perversion and bloodthirsty decadence is clearly not pitched at mainstream multiplex tastes, of course, but Conann still feels like his most fully rounded and lavishly crafted statement to date. It is certainly beautiful, with its ravishing 35mm monochrome cinematography, and graphically gory, with its visceral scenes of erotically charged sadism and ritual cannibalism. These extreme midnight-movie elements, coupled to a cryptic and episodic plot, will limit the film’s potential post-festival audiences to cult connoisseur circles. But for viewers with a high tolerance for art-house cinema with a generous undertow of transgressive pulp attitude, Conann is a richly rewarding addition to the Mandico Cinematic Universe.
The inspirational seed for Conann was Mandico’s planned stage production about a film crew shooting Conan the Barbarian (1982), the shlocky sword and sorcery saga that propelled Arnold Schwarzenegger to Hollywood action-hero fame. When the play was ultimately cancelled due to Covid, the director reworked his research material into a much grander exercise in mythopoeia, using more arcane elements drawn from the same hinterland of ancient Norse and Celtic folklore. The finished film bears only the most tenuous echoes of author Robert E. Howard’s macho warrior legend and its screen adaptations. Conann veers into high camp at times, but never stoops to kitsch self-parody.
Signalling its bold ambitions early, Conann is narrated by a dog-faced demon, Rainer, played by Mandico regular Elina Löwensohn in an impressive prosthetic mask. This audacious opening gambit could have been a preposterously silly deal-breaker, but in Mandico’s fever-dream cosmos, it feels like just another routinely surreal detail. This leather-jacketed hellhound serves as kind of underworld tour guide for the elderly version of Conann (Francoise Brion), a bewildered amnesiac slowly waking up to her bloodthirsty past lives. Each previous iteration of her character is played by a different actress, beginning with Claire Duburcq as the 15-year-old version, then Christa Théret, Sandra Parfait, Agata Buzek, Nathalie Richard, and Brion herself.
In an inspired dramatic touch, Mandico punctuates each change of lead actress with a symbolic death. When the transition comes, the younger Conann is brutally killed and replaced every decade by her future self, every assassination more cold-blooded than the last. These savage self-murders resonate on a deeper allegorical level, a metaphor for the slow corruption of youthful idealism, compassion and humanity. At one point, when Conann makes the fatal error of falling in love and tries to escape her barbaric destiny, Rainer intervenes with a darkly comic episode of inter-species sex to bring her back on track. “They forgot about death,” he growls, “I came back just in time to fan the flames of betrayal.”
The film’s bleakest section recasts Conann as a Nazi-style dictator in a coldly sadistic, heavily stylised evocation of 20th century Europe. But the climactic chapter is the strongest, and arguably the most conventional in tone, though Mandico’s definition of cinematic convention is still way off most movie maps. A savage Bunuel-esuqe satire on the power relations between impoverished artists and wealthy art patrons, this bravura finale finds Conann in middle age, a jaded grand dame who offers immense riches to a clique of achingly cool hipster artists in return for them agreeing to an outlandish orgy of cannibalism, literally biting the hand that feeds. Recalling the queasy culinary horror of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1972) and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), this sequence is the film’s most gloriously disgusting set-piece, and would probably have worked as a stand-alone drama.
For all the demands it makes on viewers with its overcooked pretensions and orgiastic violence, Conann remains consistently engrossing as a voluptuously beautiful sensory experience. Nicolas Eveilleau’s fluid, roving camerawork is clothed in gorgeous, timeless, dreamy monochrome interrupted by brief detours into vivid psychedelic colour, while Anna Le Mouel’s impressively resourceful low-budget production design is full of inventive flourishes, re-imagining Hell as a sexy blend of post-apocalyptic art gallery and cavernous techno nightclub. A lush neoclassical score by Pierre Desprats, punctuated by bursts of punky electro-pop, is ever present and darkly intoxicating.
Director, screenwriter: Bertrand Mandico
Cast: Elina Löwensohn, Christa Theret, Sandra Parfait, Julia Riedler, Claire Duburcq, Agata Buzek, Nathalie Richard, Francoise Brion
Producers: Gilles Chanial, Emmanuel Chaumet, Avi Amar
Cinematography: Nicolas Eveilleau
Editing: Laure Saint-Marc
Production design: Anna Le Mouel
Music: Pierre Desprats
Production companies: Les Films Fauves (France), Ecce Films (France), Floréal Films (France), Novak Productions (Belgium), Orphée Films (France)
World sales: Kinology
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Out of competition)
In French, English, German
105 minutes
