|
Bertrand Bonello (France, 1968), who studied classical music before becoming a filmmaker, debuted with the domestic drama
Something Organic (1998).
Le Pornographe/ The Pornographer (2001), photographed by Josee Deshaies, is not an
erotic drama but instead a drama about a terminal existential crisis and
at best a father-son relation, or, better, an analysis of a generational gap, or just the portrait of the
emotional disillusionmen of a veteran of the 1968 student riots.
The protagonist is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor that evokes the cinema of the "nouvelle vague".
Unfortunately, the idea is not fully realized and some scenes seem to have been randomly added or not edited out.
Two middle-aged couples meet for dinner and we learn that one of them,
Jacques, used to be a prolific director of pornographic films but
abandoned that line of business because it changed with the advent of
video. Because it needs money to pay debts, he has decided after many
years to return to directing.
We then see him on the set preparing to direct the new film.
He is re-married with Jeanne, his second wife, who has no complaints about their life.
The producer informs him that they need to speed up the shooting of the
film because the budget has been cut.
Jacques seems to pity the girl who plays the teenager in the film.
Jacques tells her that he has a son, Joseph, who was a toddler when Jacques
was making porn. When later Joseph found out his father's job, he left
and the two haven't spoken in years.
She says that her parents don't know about her job as a porn actress.
Jacques is clearly demotivated and distracted on the set, so the producer
takes over for an erotic scene in which two actors
(real-life pornographic actress and actor) indulge in sex, including
a very detailed masturbation with ejaculation on the face of the woman.
Then producer then tells Jacques that he is too old for this kind of work.
When he goes home, Jeanne tells him that his son Joseph called.
We then see Joseph and his two housemates in their apartment.
Jacques and Joseph meet and walk around the city. They have problems communicating and the tone is melancholic. Joseph asks if Jacques is still making porn films and Jacques tells the truth, that he had stopped but now is starting again. Jacques tries to justify himself but he sounds uncertain himself.
Joseph falls in love with a beautiful girl, Monika.
Joseph and his housemates belong to a group of rebels who disparages the old generation and despise the capitalist world that they created. In protest, they decided to stop speaking. And so his two roommates take a vow of silence.
Jacques and Joseph meet again and compare notes: Jacques was part of the protests of 1968, which were romantic, whereas his son's generation cares for more material issues, although it shares the dislike for capitalism and war.
As they walk around, they reach the point where Joseph's mother killed herself jumping from a window.
Back home, Jacques receives a phone call from a journalist, Olivia, but he pretends that she has the wrong phone number.
Jacques moves the shooting to the countryside. Joseph and his friends distribute flyers to students urgin to adopt the silent form of protest.
Monika and Joseph become lovers.
Jacques calls Jeanne from the countryside and tells her that he can't continue making porn movies.
Joseph proposes to Monika, and we don't hear the answer.
Joseph gets angry at his housemates who don't talk, only write.
He calls them "mongoloids" and they get into a physical fight.
Jacques suddenly decides to break up with Jeanne, even though they had no argument, and moves out.
His voiceover says "I'll never know why I left Jeanne."
Jacques spends some time in the country home of two friends and they, who don't have children, gift him a piece of land to build his own dream house.
Jacques starts writing a diary, and mostly it's sad meditations.
The journalist Olivia calls again. She wants to interview him for a special issue on pornography. He again declines.
Jacques looks for Joseph at his apartment but only finds his housemates who don't speak, so he writes a note for Joseph to tell him that he separated from Jeanne and is no longer a pornographer.
Realizing the form of protest adopted by the kids, Jacques reflects that he entered porn as a form of rebellion at the time when students were looking for new forms of protesting.
Jacques is pensive and abstract-minded on the set.
He has dreamed for many years to make an erotic movie in the forest,
The Animal, in which hunters pursue a young woman like
in a fox hunt (a Sade-esque twist on Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu/ The Rules of the Game).
Jacques tells Jeanne that he is
building his own house. She replies that she loves him as he is, but
he coldly replies "I don't."
His existential crisis worsens, and he writes of it in his diary.
One day Jacques follows a blonde in the streets and sneaks into her home, then simply apologizes to her and leaves.
We see him shooting "L'Animal" in the forest but it's not clear if it's
really happening or it's just in his imagination.
We don't see any sex scene, just a woman fleeing in the woods and men with dogs hunting for her.
We do see Jacques always sitting melancholy, either in his room or on
the ground where he plans his new house.
Monika tells Joseph that she's pregnant.
Finally Jacques accepts the interview and tells the journalist his life's
story, emphasizing that making pornographic films was also a political act.
When she asks him what was his favorite thing to direct, he replies
"blow jobs", which he calls "the soul of porno"
because it also involves a face, "the last bastion of humanity".
Back alone, Jacques meditates that he is looking for his son to forgive him, like a son looks for his father's forgiveness, which means that he has basically become the son of his son.
After returning to his apartment, he tries to write in his diary but can't.
He doesn't seem to have the strength to continue living.
The peak of Bonello's existential angst,
Tiresia (2003), co-written with Luca Fazzi and
photographed by Josee Deshaies,
updates to the age of transgender and of migrant issues the ancient Greek myth of Teiresias, the blind Theban seer who was first a man and then a woman and then again a man.
This is a myth that had fascinated French culture before, like in
Guillame Apollinaire's surrealist drama "Les Mamelles de Tiresias/ The Breasts of Tiresias" (1903, premiered in 1917) and in
Francis Poulenc's namesake opera buffa (composed in 1945, premiered in 1947).
The film transitions from psychological horror to spiritual parable.
Tiresia moves from one claustrophobic prison to the absolute darkness of blindness, where not only his movements are limited again but he doesn't even know where he is.
Staging the same actor as the psychotic collector and the dogmatic priest brings together transgender-ness and the supernatural, but also the murderous instincts hidden in both intellectual and religious endeavours, as both try to kill the outcast (he survives the collector but not the priest).
Sometimes the film gets too intellectual (like the unexplained references to Modigliani and Omar Khayam), but
John Fowles novel "The Collector" (1963) and George Bernanos' novel "Journal dun Cure' de Campagne/ Diary of a Country Priest", filmed by Robert Bresson in 1951, must have been among the inspirations for some of Bonello's ideas.
The film opens with
exploding lava
and majestic music (the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony) and the close-up of a pensive woman. And then we hear a male voiceover in a fatalistic tone poetically meditating about a garden of roses.
An art collector, Terranova, visits a museum of Graeco-Roman statues. Then he drives to a foresty road where prostitutes line up. Cars drive by slowly in the night and smiling prostitutes display their goods.
Terranova walks among them, pensive, and eventually runs into
a young Brazilian immigrant who is singing a children's song in a melancholy tone ("Terezinha de Jesus"). This is the woman we saw at the beginning.
Terranova takes her home, lets her undress in a simple basement-like room, and then suddenly locks her up, saying that now she belongs to him.
Terranova then drives to a bar where he gets drunk.
Terranova keeps a hedgehog as a pet in the garden.
We see a close-up of Terranova's eyes watching the prisoner, who is pacing angrily in her cell and screaming nonstop.
Eventually he walks in and calmly tells her that he will not hurt her.
He ties her hands to the bed so he can sleep next to her.
He doesn't touch her. In the morning he cooks breakfast for her.
He ties her up again and sleep next to her again.
She never tries to escape.
In the morning she asks to wash herself. She undresses and turns towards him,
exposing her... penis.
She is a transgender man, a "he".
Terranova looks disappointed and almost scared rather than disgusted.
Terranova dreams that the girl is making love to both a woman and a man.
Terranova keeps feeding his hedgehog in the garden, his only activity other than
taking care of the prisoner.
Deprived of "her" daily hormones, the "girl" begins to grow a moustache and a beard.
He brings her a razor to shave.
She has been held prisoner for several days but never tries to escape.
But one day she starts screaming out of her lungs.
Terranova walks outside and we see that they are in an isolated house.
Day by day the girl becomes more "manly" because she's not taking her daily hormones. Even her voice begins to change into a manly voice.
Terranova spies "her" from the keyhole while she's washing herself, and sees
a bearded man with a woman's breast.
Then Terranova brings her man's clothes.
Terranova is silent, tormented.
The Brazilian man still doesn't try to run away.
Terranova confesses aloud that he doesn't know what to do.
If he releases the Brazilian, his brother Eduardo, a pimp, will kill him.
Terranova is torn. He kills his hedgehog with a hammer.
Terranova ties the transsexual to the bed (now dressed like a man) and then blinds him (with scissors) so the Brazilian will never be able to recognize him.
Terranova then loads the screaming Brazilian in the trunk of the car and dumps him in the woods.
A deaf girl, Anna, attends a mass officiated by priest Francois (played by the actor who played Terranova) in a small church. Anna's father Charles reads a biblical
passage about the crucifixion of Jesus.
Anna walks back home alone through the woods and finds the unconscious
razilian man (now played by an actor, not by an actress).
Anna takes him home, washes him, nurses him and feeds him like a professional nurse without uttering a word. Her father asks him his name and why he doesn't want to go to the police. The Brazilian replies that his name is Tiresia and he is an illegal immigrant. The father accepts to keep him in the house but warns Anna that, when he's out working, she'll be an 17-year-old alone with a stranger.
Tiresia, whose head is now completely shaved, doesn't explain how he got blind.
Anna, a simple country girl, who lives in an isolated farmhouse, seems happy to take care of the blind Tiresia. One day children are playing football nearby and
they kick the ball into a window of Anna's house. A child comes to rescue
the ball. Later, Tiresia is distraught and tells Anna that the child has an older brother who is in danger. The boy is indeed injured in a car accident and the family comes to tell Tiresia that they should have listened to his warning.
Later, Tiresia makes another prediction: that someone wants to hurt a factory owner.
He has received the gift of prophecy.
Tiresia still hums "Terezinha de Jesus". We see the exploding lava of the beginning.
A woman comes to ask for advice on whether to remarry after her first husband died.
Tiresia stars receiving letters from afar, people who asks for his advice, assuming that he can foresee the fugure.
Anna's father Charles, however, is not interested in knowing his future.
He thinks, however, that Tiresia has received a gift for a purpose and therefore must use it.
One day Tiresia writes to his brother Eduardo the pimp that he will never return to the old profession and they will never meet again.
When Tiresia tells a man that his depressed teenage son just killed himself, the man calls him the "devil".
Meanwhile boys are caressing and kissing Anna who doesn't rebel.
Next we see a line of people coming to bring gifts to the prophet. He is crying
in his room.
We hear Odetta Holmes singing Pete Seeger's "Poor Little Jesus" while we see
people praying to Tiresia outside the house.
The priest, Francois, is told of Tiresia's "miracles" and decides to visit him, but hiding the fact that he's a priest, dressed in regular clothes.
The encounter lasts only a few seconds but Tiresia calls him "father". The priest asks him how he figured out that he's a priest. Tiresia replies with Jesus' words: "Forgive Father because I have sinned".
Francois (who is playing by the same actor who played Terranova), who keeps a Modigliani's painting "Madame Zborowska on the Couch" (1917) in his room, takes care of a garden of roses outside the church.
Francois returns to the house to find out more about Tiresia but Tiresia claims that he doesn't remember how he became blind.
Francois tells Tiresia that he reminds him of Modigliani's madame.
The priest notices that Tiresia has not opened most of the letters that people wrote to him. The priest reads him a poem by Omar Khayam about the wisdom of blind people.
Tiresia candidly admits (like in a church confession) that he's just "a whore from Brazil" and doesn't understand profound literature. Tiresia confesses how he grew up in a favela, how he became a woman and then a whore. He tells the priest about his desperation that people don't see.
Later, Francois admits to himself that people trust Tiresia better than him, their priest. Meanwhile, Tiresia remembers about his past as a whore, living with Eduardo who provided the shots of hormones, and the encounter with Terranova.
Then we see Tiresia wandering on the paved road and then we see him lying on the asphalt in a pool of blood, hit by a car, and we see that the priest was the one driving the car.
Tiresia's last thought (a voiceover) is that Anna will be the mother of Jesus.
The priest then returns to the church and starts pruning his roses.
Anna is his assistant and plays with a child outside the church.
This cryptic ending could mean
It is not revealed whether the priest deliberately killed Tiresia or it was just a weird accident, and whether Tiresia foresaw and/or caused his own death, and it is not clear who got Anna pregnant (if that's what Tiresia's last words mean): Tiresia himself, the priest, the village boys...?
De la Guerre/ On War (2008) is about a middle-aged filmmaker (who resembles Bonello) who comically falls into a coffin and then joins a
new-age cult.
L'Apollonide - Souvenirs de la Maison Close/ House of Pleasures (2011),
again photographed by Josee Deshaies,
doesn't have much of a plot: it's a series of tableux that
depict the daily life of prostitutes in a fin-de-siecle brothel.
Nonetheless it feels like an involuntary summary of a century of undercurrents
in multiple arts:
Edouard Manet's painting of a naked prostitute "Olympia" (1865),
Victor Hugo's novel "L'Homme qui Rit" (1869) for the scarred woman and
Arthur Schnitzler's novella "Dream Story" (1926) for the masked party,
the mistreated prostitutes of the film noir, like in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953),
the sexual perversion of the bourgeoisie, from Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour (1966) to
Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo' or the 120 days of Sodom" (1975)
to Peter Greenaway's The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover (1989),
the idealized microcosm of the brothel in films like
Hsia-Hsien Hou's Les Fleurs de Shanghai (1998) and
Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978), set in a New Orleans brothel of 1917,
the cacophonous split-screen technique of
John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966) and
John McTiernan's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968),
or, even better, of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), that follows the lives of girls in a New York hotel.
It is obvious that the heroines of the story have no future, but their
future is not the point of the film: the way they live while being aware of
that future is the point of the film.
Sensuality is not the center of mass of the story, but it is certainly
created by Josee Deshaies's lascivious cinematography and Anais Romand's voluptuous costumes.
The film takes place in Paris at the time of the Dreyfus affair.
Marie runs a high-class brothel.
Initially the focus is on Madeleine, nicknamed "Jewess".
She has a loyal client, Jacques, but she has
sinister premotions in the form of a dream: that he will give her an emerald,
she will ask him if it's a marriage proposal, he will not answer and instead,
wearing a white mask,
he will assault her and his sperm will travel inside her body and flow out
of her eyes in the form of tears.
The girls keep themselves clean and dress elegantly for their elegant
clientele.
Before the clients arrive,
the camera lingers on their intimate conversations.
The madame, Marie, reads a letter from an aspiring prostitute, the 15-year-old Pauline.
During the party with the clients, all the girls move their wet fingers on their glasses to produce noise.
Madeleine's man wants to tie her up and she lets him do it: he cuts her mouth
with a knife, leaving her screaming with blood all over her face.
Her premonition has come true.
Julie, nicknamed "Caca", who is Italian, is treated to a ride to the countryside by her man, Maurice.
The madame interviews the aspiring teenager and makes sure she has no scars,
is on good health, and has obtained a permit.
Pauline is assigned to Clothilde's room, who told her man that she is 28 and has been doing this for 12 years (hence she started at the same age).
Clothilde instructs her to never go out alone, to wash and perfume herself,
and how to entertain the clients.
While the girls wait for customers, they talk about the debts that turned them
into prostitutes.
At the end of the night, the girls trade reports on their night, how many men
they have to serve: four, five, six, ...
Marie writes a letter to a powerful friend: she is a
widow with two children and cannot afford the
rent increase. She may have to close the brothel and at her age there is
no other profession for her.
A prostitute is forced by her man to move around like a doll and then bend,
before the man takes her from behind.
Marie takes the girls at a picnic by the river.
The prefect replies to Marie that he cannot help her, and one of the girls
sees the letter.
Her man dumps Clothilde for the new girl, the 16-year-old, dressed in a kimono
and pretending to speak Japanese.
The girls have to undergo lengthy
gynecological
visits. The doctor finds out that
Samira was pregnant (and most likely had an abortion) and that
Julie has syphilis.
A girl cries reading a book on prostitutes that describes them as perverted criminals.
Marie has an argument with Clothilde, who is addicted to opium.
Maurice writes a letter to Julie that he cannot risk catching the disease,
and Marie tears it up so Julie will never read it.
A group of rich people hires Madeleine for a special party
at a classy restaurant, with naked girls as waitresses.
They undress the scarred Madeleine and gets excited touching her.
Meanwhile at the brothel the girls chat anxious about their future.
Julie dies and the girls dance sadly among themselves,
crying for Julie's death.
Madeleine has recurring nightmares about her incident.
On a national holiday the prostitutes and their clients wear masks.
Someone mentions the opening of the metro.
The party also celebrates the end of the brothel.
Samira's man has paid her debt and "bought" her.
The others will be sold to other brothels.
Madeleine cries sperm, just like in her old dream.
The last two minutes show a street of modern Paris, with prostitutes waiting
for customers. A car stops and
a prostitute comes out who looks like
Clothilde (played by the same actress).
Saint Laurent (2014) is a biopic of the fashion designer.
Nocturama (2016), which came out after some of France's worst terrorist attacks, is the first installment in Bonellos "Youth Trilogy".
There is however no psychological or sociological analysis of what leads
the kids to destroy their life. The film is valuable for the
innovative structure of a crime thriller where suspense arises from simply
learning little by little what is going on.
We are so busy putting together the chaotic puzzle of the first part that
we hardly care for the motives that led these terrorists to such a silly and
suicidal action.
If there is any psychological analysis, it comes at the end, when the aspiring
terrorists are simply playing around the store, displaying that they are
fundamentally just a bunch of inept children.
The film opens with a helicopter view of Paris.
Then we see a number of young people enter and leave the subway.
They meet, split, never talk to each other.
Sophie checks in at a hotel.
A boy, Samir, picks up car keys from a motorcycle and gets into a car.
Andre', dressed formally, enters a government building.
Another one, the youngest of the group, Mika, is out delivering a box.
Two boys, David and Samir, enter a building from a back door, helped by security guard Fred, followed later by a girl, Sarah,
Bags exchange hands.
Andre', the one dressed formally, is escorted to the office of a politician who asks about his studies in political science and about his father.
One boy hides in an office.
We see two boys, Fred and Yacine, waiting for a job interview and meeting an
older adult, Greg.
We see the one who is now in the car, Samir, being warned (presumably earlier) by his sister Sabrina that their mother found something upsetting on his computer and she's out of her mind.
That young woman, Sabrina, is now cleaning a Jeanne d'Arc bronze statue in a square.
Andre' walks into a bank to make a deposit but isn't allowed in because he doesn't have any id.
Andre' meets one of the girls, Sarah, and we see that they are both students of political science. They meet in a cafe' where Yacine is a waiter.
Sarah's boyfriend David joins them.
An adult armed with a gun, Greg, rings a bell and coldly kills a man, then walks outside still holding the gun.
Andre' leaves the office of the politician and sneaks into an office to unlock the back door.
The delivery boy, Mika, walks in that floor with the box in his hands.
David and Sarah walk to two different floors of a high-rise building, where nobody seems to be working.
The delivery boy, Mika, walks into a meeting room, opens his box and leaves somthing under a window.
We see all the kids around a table discussing an explosive called "semtex".
The meeting is presided by a moustached man, Greg, the one we have seen killing a man.
we see Yacine, Sarah and Mika playing a videogame.
We see Andre', Fred and Sophie discussing the fancy hotel, and Sophie rehearsing what to say when she asks for the room.
We are beginning to understand that some of the scenes are flashbacks: the preparation for what they are about to do.
We see Sarah setting up a bomb.
The building is empty. Fred notices someone, pulls out a gun,
and kills him, but then another security guard kills him. David witnesses it.
We see Yacine and Mika throw away their phones. A second later
Mika is hit by a car.
We see Andre' leave the government building and throw away his phone.
Mika gets up and runs away without complaining to the driver who hit him.
The other kids one by one throw away their phones.
In the evening a bomb rocks the government building. Sarah checks her watch
and stares at the high-rise building of a bank.
The statue catches fire in the square.
Cars explode in a street.
Sarah is still waiting until finally a floor of the building explodes.
A shopping mall is being evacuated.
The security guards escort everybody out, turn off the lights and watch the news.
The young terrorists are hiding there in the dark and come out one by one:
Andre', David, his girlfriend Sarah, Yacine, Samir, his sister Sabrina, little Mika.
Their accomplice Omar, who works there, has made sure to disable most of the surveillance cameras.
Greg, the adult leader, is missing.
David tells the others that Fred has been killed.
Mika is injured.
Omar shows to Andre' that he has placed semtex.
They plan to hide in the shopping mall for one day.
They watch the news on the tv sets of the electronic department and see images
of their terrorist acts.
We see that Omar has killed all the security guards and in reality the surveillance cameras are all working: it's just that nobody is alive to watch.
Bored, they explore the department store and steal some of the items.
Without telling the others, David walks outside to smoke a cigarette, meets
a complete stranger, middle-aged Jean-Claude, and, guessing that he must be
homeless, invites him inside.
David walks in the deserted streets. It feels like there is a curfew.
He sees a car on fire and only meets a cyclist.
David imagines how Fred was killed.
Suddenly the homeless man and his wife show up, as David left the door open for them. This terrifies the others.
The kids spend the night chatting, eating, shoplifting, playing.
David sees on television that the cops have surrounded the building.
Andre' tells him not to tell the others.
Andre' places semtex all over the building as a way to keep the cops out.
Mika falls asleep and dreams Greg, who tells him that he committed suicide rather than compromise them after he realized that he was walking in the streets with his gun visible.
Andre' reveals that they have explosive but no detonators.
Meanwhile, the homeless and his wife steal and eat at will, clueless.
The cops start moving in.
Yacine is the first one getting killed.
Then the homeless.
The kids hear the shots and finally realize what is happening.
They hide in different places while the cops search every room.
We see in the surveillance cameras that the cops shoot them one by one.
Andre' tries to surrender but is still shot dead.
Ditto Omar.
Even little Mika is shot after raising his hands.
The cops take no chances.
Zombi Child (2019), the second part of the trilogy, is de facto a horror movie that connects a Haitian voodoo zombie and a French teenage girl.
The film is slow and rather predictable. The etnographic part is a bit outdated.
Haiti 1962. Someone is preparing a disgusting magic potion with animal entrails.
A man suddenly collapses in the street.
We then see the funeral. We then see workers in the field of a
sugarcane plantation who walk slowly and silently like zombies.
They are treated like slaves by the guards.
The film then forwards to contemporary France where a teacher discusses the
Revolution with the students of an isolated boarding school
for girls of elite families (daughters of Legion of Honour recipients).
One of the students, Fanny,
writes a letter to someone whom she misses very much. She mentions that she
befriended a new Black girl,
Melissa, from Haiti.
The other girls of the secret sorority think Melissa is weird and decide to test her
before accepting her in their sorority.
In another letter Fanny talks about Lola, a sexy lesbian who tried to kiss her.
Then we are back in Haiti and witness the workers moving slowly and silently in the fields. One of them, after eating meat (which is forbidden to the workers), wanders away, unseen by the guards.
Back to the boarding school, Fanny and his sorority friends test Melissa asking
her to say something very personal.
Melissa recites a strange poem that mixes visions of slavery and references to zombie subculture.
Melissa tells them that she came to France as a child after an earthquake that killed her parents. Her mother had the Legion of Honor and she doesn't know why.
She now lives with her aunt, who is a mambo, a voodoo priestess.
Later, Fanny searches the internet for the word "mambo" and finds out that a mambo can do supernatural things.
Fanny keeps sending messages to her love: school is almost over and she tells him
that she can't wait to see him again;
but her "love" never replies.
Back to Haiti 1962. The Black fugitive reaches a city. He visits the tomb of
a Clairvius Narcisse who just died.
Fanny dreams of her boyfriend, Pablo. Melissa makes strange noises when she sleeps and says strange things, like that she's going to eat Fanny.
We hear Fanny's thoughts and she is telling Pablo that she is miserable after
his latest message, presumably a breakup message. We didn't see any of his messages, and we never saw Fanny write her messages: we only hear her thinking about it.
We see instead Melissa's aunt smoke something and enter a trance.
Fanny finds out where Melissa lives and visits her aunt, Katy.
Fanny tells her that she is dying of heartbreak and asks the mambo to use
her magic to bring back her boyfriend. The mambo refuses: her mission is only
to bring news to the ones who died in the earthquake.
Fanny offers all her money. The mambo warns her that it will be painful.
The mambo tells her that she is the daughter of a zombie.
In Haiti the Black fugitive lives in a ruined building outside town and eats whatever meat he can find. Which also means that he becomes more and more human.
Melissa notices that Fanny doesn't show up at class. Fanny is with her aunt.
Meanwhile, that same day in Haiti a candlelight procession is taking place.
Melissa explains to her sorority friends that it's the anniversary of her grandfather's death, who died in 1962, and was buried half-alive half-dead and became a zombie. His name: Clairvius.
Melissa explains that some men stole his corpse from the grave, gave him an antidote and turned it into a zombie working as a slave in the plantation.
The zombie regained his consciousness when he accidentally ate meat.
Melissa explains that the zombification had been organized by his brother in order to get the inheritance. When his brother died,
Clairvius returned to his wife and had two daughters: Melissa's
aunt Katy and Melissa's mother.
Meanwhile, Katy the aunt is performing the voodoo ritual on Fanny to attract Pablo.
Fanny is soon possessed by Baron Samedi, the master of the dead, and speaks with a male voice to the aunt, scolding her for not participating in the memorial for
her father.
Katy is terrified and screams.
Both Fanny and Katy collapse. Fanny revives, Katy doesn't.
The film ends in Haiti in 1980 when
Clairvius returns to his wife.
She just smiled and hugged him.
Coma (2022) is a non-narrative collage of ideas inspired by the "lockdowns" during the covid pandemic, when people were forced to live in isolation.
The result is a sort of abstract and delirious cine-essay which is
visually captivating because Bonello, unable to film with a real cast,
employs a number of techniques besides
live action: doll theater that simulates a sitcom, documentary footage,
surveillance cameras and
animation.
The protagonist is a girl who reacts to isolation by projecting herself into
different dimensions of reality and of imagination: her dolls live their life in one dimension, an imaginary social-media influencer posts videos on a variety of topics, her own thoughts turn into cartoons, her friends populate real physical life,
her dreams populate another dimension, and finally someone is watching her (we never find out who). A further meta-dimension is created by the awareness that the protagonist is meant to represent the filmmaker's own daughter.
She spends her life watching the silly videos of a charismatic social-media influencer, videochatting with friends, or daydreaming. Her family is never shown, although there are two mysterious English-speaking characters watching her moves. The dimensions flow into each other, one feeding the other.
The ending is reminiscent of the lava of Tiresia .
The film opens with rapidly moving psychedelic images and philosophical subtitles.
The filmmaker confesses that this is a film he wanted to make in 2014 but got out of control and only during the lockdown he found the concentration to make it.
It is dedicated to his teenage daughter, and it is also a
requiem for the ones who died of covid.
A woman named Patricia Coma has a successful business posting videos on a Youtube channel.
We are then introduced to an unnamed girl who is locked into her apartment during the covid lockdown of 2020. Her only contact with the outside world are the videochats with her friend Tess and other girls and the videos of Patricia Coma.
The voiceover of an old man (we hear his voice but only see his mouth) gives
a psychological lecture on the danger of dreaming. It's a paraphrase of a lecture by real-like French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
We then see the girl's dolls that are placed in lego-like doll-house.
We hear a male doll tell the Sharon doll that her husband Scott kissed another woman, and we see Sharon being devastated.
Then we are back to the Patricia channel: she advertises a gadget called
Revelator, a game. The girl has one and plays it. Patricia goes on a lengthy
monologue about the Revelator concluding that it proves that free will doesn't exist.
Back to the dolls: Sharon doesn't have the strength to leave Scott.
The girl then has a nightmare in which she enters a forest and is
followed by a man. In the morning she calls Tess and start telling her the dream
but the video connection dies.
We see two eyes populating the screen.
The girl sends a message to Patricia asking to talk in private.
We hear (but not see)
a man and a woman speaking in English while the screen splits in four screens,
one for each surveillance camera, following the moves of the girl as she leaves
the apartment.
The girl proves to Tess that she always wins if she plays the Revelator game blindfolded.
We hear the sitcom of the dolls again, and we even hear the audience laughing.
Patricia gives a monologue about winning and losing with the
Revelator game. She provides a
confused explanation for why someone can win all the time: the girl could be under hypnosis.
The girl has
another horror dream, this time with Patricia in it.
She follows Patricia and hear people screaming in the forest.
When the dream ends, the girl is lying in bed and we see a cartoon version of the scene.
We see Patricia again, this time a video in a kitchen.
Then a few seconds of a real-life interview with an
American serial killer
(Robert Spahalski)
who talks about his victims.
The Sharon doll confronts the Scott doll who denies having an affair, and we hear the audience launghing.
Scott boasts of being a genius and it is obviously a parody of US president Donald Trump (a notorious imbecile).
While sitting alone at a restaurant Patricia talks about the dolls.
The girl enters the dream again.
Patricia makes a video at a museum, and in particular talks about
real-life billionaire Jeff Bezos.
We see an animation of a serial killer confessing to the girl in her bedroom.
We then see the girl focused on watching the sitcom of her dolls.
Six girls videochat to discuss their favorite serial killers.
Patricia is somehow watching them as they chat (as if they are a stage show and Patricia is watching them in the audience).
Tess disappears. Our girl can't stand the lockdown anymore.
The
Scott doll debates with his sister Ashley if he likes Sharon or Barbara better.
These dolls too have curfew lockdown.
Ashley is so bored and frustrated that she begs Scott to have sex with her even if they are siblings.
We then see
Patricia as a TV announcer announcing coldly that some countries will not receive the covid vaccine, including France itself.
The Sharon doll consults a psychologist.
The girl dreams again to be wandering in the forest. She finds Tess who tells her that they are in the "Free Zone".
The
Sharon doll cries because she had a dream of being alone and lost in the forest among dead people including her brother and friends.
The story switches again to an animation of the girl and a man discussing philosophy. She tells him that she wants to leave town.
The dolls comment on what they heard her say in animation.
The Sharon doll complains that she's tired of the sitcom they are playing.
She too wants to quit and leave, like our girl.
The screen splits again in four screens and the same voices
in English discuss that they haven't seen the girl in several days and that she left behind the Revelator.
Patricia is first at the fancy restaurant and then turns into a weather girl
giving us the weather forecast against a solid green background imagining that shes in front of a map.
Then she's in the kitchen putting her hand into the blender.
Back to the dream in the forest, we hear a woman scream. The girl recognizes her father (the filmmaker himself?) and then she runs into
Patricia.
And then the scene morphs into
an animation of our girl and Tess
in the forest, a thunderstorm approaching.
We see documentary images of tsunamis, avalanches, explosions, wildfires, lava, ...
The subtitles are again a message of the filmmaker to his daughter, an optimistic
philosophical conclusion: "a new day will soon dawn".
La Bete/ The Beast (2023),
again photographed by Josee Deshaies and
inspired by
Henry James horror novella "The Beast in the Jungle" (but wildly different from the book),
is a 146-minute hybrid film that combines three genres:
a romantic melodrama set in Paris in 1910 during a famous flood;
a thriller set in Los Angeles in 2014 during an earthquake;
and a dystopian sci-fi movie set in Paris in 2044 when AI has taken over the world.
The three eras share the same protagonist and in each era the protagonist
is haunted by a primal fear for a "beast", for a catastrophe that will destroy her and everybody around her.
In each age the protagonist does suffer a catastrophe, but the real "beast" is the last one: the moral destruction of humanity.
There are echoes of
Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad (1961),
of Godard's "Alphaville" (1965)
and
of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956);
and
the tragic love story feels like a variant of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights".
But the three planes intersect in nonlinear ways.
And the love story doesn't repeat itself identical: the first time they both die,
the second time one kills the other, and the third time neither dies. The love story turns from purely romantic to more and more sinister and amoral.
There are dolls in the Victorian-era melodrama (a factory of dolls), there is a doll in the Los Angeles villa, and there is a robotic doll in the future.
There are natural disasters in the past (a flood, an earthquake) but not in the future.
Not only has AI taken over the world, but it also discriminates against emotional humans: it's only by removing their emotions that humans can apply for important jobs; otherwise they cannot be trusted. The purification process consists in re-living some tragedies of the past. The protagonist is the humble heroine that
determines to remain human and emotional. However, she has tried to be purified,
and it's an accident that she remains human. Secondly, she is condemned to be
the only one without a good job and the only one with emotions.
The "beast" is our inner self.
The film tames the anarchic and almost improvised method of Coma with
to fit a more narrative cinema, although at every moment it feels like the film
is trying to escape the plot.
The voiceover of the filmmaker instructs the actress Lea Seydoux to walk to the center of a solid-green screen and then instructs her to begin the scene. She grabs a knife from a table, looks afraid, and then sees something that makes her scream.
The green screen disintegrates and the film begins in earnest.
In 1910 in Paris, the aristocratic Gabrielle (played by the same Lea Seydoux) is attending a party in a vast opulent palace and looking for her husband Georges.
Avantgarde paintings are being exhibited in a salon.
She is introduced to the young Anton and then she is approached by Louis,
a young Englishman,
who remembers meeting her years earlier in Italy.
She doesn't remember him. But he claims she told him of her fear for a "beast" that will destroy her life, something she has never told anybody.
She even told him back then that she didn't want any relationship because she was afraid it would destroy anybody around her. Nonetheless she got married.
We learn that Gabrielle is a celebrated concert pianist.
They flirt.
She then looks for her husband Georges, a wealthy man,
and we hear her stream of consciousness... which turns into an interview in
which a man we cannot see asks her about her childhood in the USA and the
escape of her family to China after the civil war broke up.
This is not the same Gabrielle: are now in the year 2044.
The screeen shrinks to a smaller size (and it will do so for every other scene of 2044).
As she walks out of the interview, she runs into a man who looks like the Louis of the first section, who is lost in the building and is going to the same interview.
She then goes to another interview. Again we don't see the man interviewing her.
He seems to know her well. He doesn't trust her to take a more responsible job because she is vulnerable to strong emotions.
He mentions the "tragedies of 2025".
She refused to clean her DNA and get rid of her emotional side.
At home a woman we don't see talks to her
encouraging her to undertake the "purification" procedure so she can qualify for
more interesting jobs.
Gabrielle objects that she's afraid of losing her feelings. The unseen woman convinces her.
We then we see her accepting the procedure and talking to a man we don't see.
She shares her fear that something terrible is going to happen to her.
The man tells her that's another reason to perform the procedure.
A robotic arm inserts a needle into her head...
And we are back to the pianist Gabrielle of 1910 flirting with Louis.
They discuss how her husband had the idea to make dolls. He became wealthy
with a doll factory. She doesn't have children yet but wants to have some.
He's a bachelor who prefers Paris over London.
We then see black and white stills of the London flood of 1910.
Gabrielle's mansion is left with no electricity. Her husband
Georges has something to say to her but she walks away.
A pigeon attacks her.
The premonition of a disaster persists even during the flood, so that's not it.
Louis and Gabrielle go to the opera together
("Madame Butterfly").
Louis hints that maybe the disaster she fears has already happened: she has married a boring man.
He invites her to see a clairvoyant.
The clairvoyant tells Gabrielle that the pigeon is a divine messenger, delivering the message that someone is going to die; that
the "beast" is a real disaster that is going to happen to Gabrielle;
there is danger caused by a knife on a table and a man in the next room
who can only make love in his dreams.
While we hear the voice of the fortune teller, the
camera walks around a villa of 2014 Los Angeles, showing us first
a knife on a table and then Gabrielle having sex with a man on the couch.
Later she writes a sort of farewell letter to her husband, saying that these have been the happiest years of her life but also that a profound frustration is causing her to abandon him.
And suddenly we are back to 2044. The purification procedure is complete
and the robotic doll Kelly provides free companionship.
Gabrielle asks to go to a dance-club and Kelly takes her to a place that is
playing retro music from the 1970s.
There Gabrielle meets Louis and tells him that she didn't go through purification (but she did).
He too is having anxiety attacks and he too is skeptic about purification.
She asks him about "Madame Butterfly". He doesn't remember.
Gabrielle tells Kelly that she left her husband for that man once.
Gabrielle is back at the interview with the unseen man. He shows her an image
(that we don't see) that makes her cry. This means the purification failed.
Now she has to decide whether she wants to do it again and chats with the woman that we don't see.
We are back in 1910 in flooded Paris and in the doll factory.
Louis arrives and Gabrielle asks an employee to give him a tour of the factory.
Gabrielle has fantasies of Louis kissing her.
When all the workers are gone, Louis erotically massages her hand but she retracts it.
Just then the electricity goes off: the water has entered the factory, causing an electrical short circuit that causes a fire.
They swim underwater looking for an exit but in vain.
They both drown. Her husband reads her farewell letter.
(It's confusing that she doesn't seem to be planning to elope with Louis but she seems to be planning to leave her husband).
And suddenly we are in 2014 in Los Angeles and she is diving into a swimming pool.
And we see Louis making a lengthy video in which he confesses being a lonely, desperate, 30-year-old virgin, and is bitter about women.
Gabrielle is an aspiring model but she tells fellow model Dakota that her real ambition is to become an actress. Dakota recommends a surgeon, dr Weill, to improve her looks.
Dakota is a babysitter. Gabrielle is house-sitting in the villa with the
swimming pool. Dakota asks Gabrielle to hold on to her psychedelic pills
and invites her to a danceclub called "Fractal".
Louis heads to the same club, angry at women.
Gabrielle shows up but Dakota can't make it. Gabrielle tries her pills.
She tries to befried three girls but they treat her like an inferior being because she is too plain. She dances alone. Louis wants revenge over women.
He randomly picks Gabrielle when she leaves the club and follows her home.
Browsing the internet, Gabrielle runs into the website of Gina the fortune teller.
She connects with her on the computer but the fortune teller seems to be totally
wrong about her: Gabrielle doesn't have a boyfriend, but the fortune teller is convinced that she has been chasing a man for a long time and that the man only makes love in dreams. Gabrielle closes the computer disappointed.
She turns on the TV and watches a man sing a moving song. The space starts
warping (a visual effect) as if the whole world is dancing.
Then suddenly an earthquake shakes the house.
She runs out where other people are already assembled.
She sees Louis, who seems transfixed.
They introduce each other.
she invites him inside.
He refuses but then he follows her inside.
He is shy, she kisses him. They start having sex on the couch
(shown on a four-way split screen evoking a surveillance system).
And suddenly the man who is kissing her is a different man. She screams, scared.
The man is puzzled and runs away. We don't know if Gabrielle imagined the whole
scene with Louis. Louis is parked outside, making
a video, and we learn that the earthquake and their encounter was real.
Louis says that "today is the day of retribution".
We are not told who was the man with Gabrielle.
It was not in her imagination because later someone phones asking who was
the man who left the house.
Gabrielle gets angry and breaks a valuable Ming vase.
Then she turns on the TV again and listens to another moving song.
Every now and then we see that she is "dreaming" all of this in 2044.
As she speaks remotely with a friend, we learn that the purification process
is continuing. She walks into a dance club called "1980" that plays retro
1980s music. She asks for Louis but the manager refuses to answer.
Again she asks three girls to sit with them and they don't want her.
Then she's ready again for another robotic injection.
She is back in 2014, going to an audition on a stage with a solid-green wall
like the one of the beginning of the film.
Back home, she searches the internet for information on Louis, and finds a lot
of pictures of him.
Then she searches for herself and is confused by what she finds.
A virus takes over her computer and she has to shut it down. Even the doll in the house starts behaving weirdly. The burglar alarm goes off which triggers a call from the monitoring service.
After reassuring them that there is no intruder, she returns to her computer
only to find out that somehow the virus has installed Louis' video in which
he states that he is still a virgin and only has sex in his dreams,
and that today is the day of retribution.
Gabrielle videochats with the fortune teller,
who mentioned the man who only has sex in his dreams.
The fortune teller refuses to speak because Gabrielle is
not alone.
Now she's enacting the first scene: she grabs a knife,
sees something scary, screams and locks herself in the room with
the split screen of the surveillance cameras.
She sees Louis enter the house, armed with a pistol.
She talks to him through the surveillance system.
He tells her not to open the door. She opens the door.
They face each other. She kisses him.
Space dissolves and the scene rewinds and we see her dead in the swimming pool
and Louis still holding the pistol.
Now in 2044 Gabrielle is being shown the scene of her death. That's the image
that made her cry and made her fail the test. The unseen man says that she's
the rare case for whom the purification process doesn't work. They can't remove
her feelings.
By now it is clear that the disembodied voices are the voices of AI.
Later Gabrielle chats with Kelly the robot, who behaves like a lesbian and kisses her sensually.
Kelly has fallen in love.
Not only the purification process failed, but it backfires and turned the robot into a human with emotions.
Gabrielle asks Kelly a favor, which is contrary to the rules: to help her meet Louis.
Gabrielle and Louis meet at the dance club, "The Beast".
Gabrielle is ready to surrender to her feelings for Louis, but
purification has worked on him and he has no feelings anymore even though they are dancing to the moving song (Roy Orbison's "Evergreen").
And he got the important job that he wanted. He's happy.
She cries and screams: their love has terminally ended,
and she is now the only person left with emotions.
She has met the "beast" that she has always feared.
(Copyright © 2019 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
|
