She Is Conann presents the viewer with a diabolical choice: eat a plate of expired meats and descend into a hallucinatory nightmare of blood and terror, or watch this movie. Either way, the experience will be roughly the same, but the diabolical part is that you might enjoy the movie. A fever dream from beginning to end, it will strain your senses, but may also reveal beautiful visions you’ve never seen on a screen before. Written and directed by Bertrand Mandico, She Is Conann is an exercise in cinematic maximalism married to narrative minimalism. The storyline is thin, but the sights and sensations are epic.
Riffing on the pulp mythology of Conan the Barbarian as originated by Robert E. Howard in
Weird Tales magazine in the 1930s, Mandico’s script reimagines the warrior as a woman moving through distinct stages of her life. As told in incantatory narration, Conann as a young girl (Claire Duburcq) in ancient Sumeria was first motivated by a quest for vengeance. This ended up turning her into a bloodthirsty killer far worse than those who murdered her own mother. An early scene establishes this set-up as young Conann is dragged before an old woman on a throne (Françoise Brion) who shares the same name. In fact, Conann will meet herself various times in the course of this centuries-spanning story, with different actors portraying distinct qualities of the maturing and unraveling warrior. Think Orlando with machine guns. The personage who facilitates the transitions between one Conann and another is the Hellhound Rainer (Elina Löwensohn), a dog-faced demon who may or may not have Conann’s best interests at heart. And things haven’t even started to get weird yet.
The French director is known for his Incoherence Manifesto which holds that “to be incoherent is to have faith in cinema,…disturbed and dreamlike.” Both adjectives apply to the tactile imagery in Nicolas Eveilleau’s cinematography. Colors are saturated, highlights pop and glow, bokeh swirl like confetti. The camera slithers and pans across the convulsing bodies of warriors vomiting geysers of blood. Human faces appear in disorienting layers: on the actors, on the chest plates of the barbarians, on vast statues in the background. Shifting occasionally into black and white, the film mimics the rich texture and contrast of old Hollywood, compressing the depth of field to just an inch or two of clarity in the midst of blurring and flaring elements. Individual compositions from this film could be framed and hung in museums where they would stop visitors in their tracks.
Questions abound, while answers flee. Why is Conann depicted as a woman when so much of her affect and behavior seems male-coded? Who or what is Rainer, the dog-faced demon? What does Conann actually seek, now that revenge is long behind her? Of course, it seems silly to expect answers from a film intentionally designed to feel incoherent. The story unrolls like a fever dream toward a conclusion no one could have foreseen. Suffice to say that one late scene features a dinner party gorging on meat of questionable provenance, as if acknowledging the hallucinatory quality of the events we’ve just witnessed. It’s hard to say which is the more grotesque imagery: the early scenes of warriors vomiting blood, or the late scene of sycophants gobbling flesh. One or the other is bound to revisit you in your dreams.
A bit more narrative coherence might have been helpful for guiding viewers along the thread that connects the different ages and attitudes of the protagonist. As it is, the principle through-line amounts to dream logic, which is no logic at all. Like the films of Peter Greenaway or Dario Argento, much of the appeal of She Is Conann lies in the extravagant staging of the action and the lush colors and textures which saturate the screen. When the spell breaks and the credits roll, you may have no idea what you’ve just experienced, but images and feelings will linger. Was it a nightmare or was it a movie? She Is Conann says “Yes.”
Photo courtesy of Altered Innocence
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