French director Bertrand Bonello had an arthouse breakout this year with The Beast, an extended science fiction riff on Last Year at Marienbad loosely based on a Henry James short story. The Nocturama director tackles similar ideas on love and fear and genre-jumping aesthetics in Coma, a relative letdown that seems like a dry run for the more ambitious success. While on some level this intimate work may be more personal—Bonello dedicates Coma to his 18-year-old daughter, who’s the same age as its young protagonist—his visual ideas, however intriguing, seem half-baked.
Coma begins with Bonello narrating its genesis as a project in honor of his daughter’s 18th birthday. Speaking with fresh memories of the pandemic lockdown, he muses on what the world lost in that time, and in particular how difficult it was to reach adulthood at a time when one couldn’t leave the house. Bonello then introduces the characters in what is for the most part a two-hander: an unnamed teenager (Louise Labèque) appears first, looking awkward as teenagers do. She’s in her bedroom, which is about as far as she can get under lockdown, but she has a vivid dream life: she wanders through a forbidding and mostly monochromatic woods, her nightmare vision intermittently interrupted with flashes of color from friends she can’t see in person; and most prominently, she encounters in the woods and out of them, enigmatic vlogger Patricia Coma (Julia Faure).
Bonello deploys a varied range of visual templates, many in clear reference to another artist: the teenager’s inner life is regularly saturated with an animated dollhouse melodrama that looks like a polished variation on Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (and, briefly, Team America: World Police. The essayistic, navel-gazing structure recalls Chris Marker, particularly the post-apocalyptic Level Five. And shots of the teenager occasionally resemble the work of Rineke Dijkstra, a Dutch artist whose photographs and videos vividly document the anxieties of adolescence.
Such visual restlessness suits a teenager’s conflicts, sure; the eternal question “why is my body changing” becomes “why is my aesthetic changing,” a query that is clearly haunting Bonello in this time of global crisis. But the central teen is so passive there’s no sense of her finding her voice, unless the older Coma—who in the film’s animated sequences looks just like the young woman) is a manifestation of a bolder, more mature self.
There are plenty of provocative ideas here: the idea that the lockdown arrested the development of a whole world full of young people, and that notions of freedom and free will were turned upside down. But Coma is a good hour shorter than The Beast, which embodies 21st century anxieties with more depth and more pizzazz. It helps that The Beast revolves around a knockout performance from Lea Seydoux. It’s not Labèque’s fault that her character is so amorphous, and Faure leans into her vlogger persona with a sly, dark humor. But the ideas in Coma seem like sketches, meted out in the kinds of skits a teenager under lockdown might act out in the isolation of her bedroom.
Coma was released in France in 2022, before The Beast, but it’s only making it to these shores now, likely thanks to his latest success. Viewers who see it before The Beast might appreciate its conceptual workshopping as a crucial precursor. But seen after that near-masterpiece, Coma can’t help but be a sleepwalking trifle.
Photo courtesy of Film Movement
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