Coma: the science of dreams

With ComaBertrand Bonello intrudes on the dreams of an 18-year-old girl, zapping between different worlds in a do-it-yourself hybrid experience in a creepy era.

containment films, Coma, by Bertrand Bonello, is perhaps the most surprising. Shot over twelve days, with a skeleton crew,”in a kind of joy, lightness and smallness”, this fascinating object sees the director of night interfere in the dreams of an 18-year-old girl, zapping with her between different worlds -sitcoms, a youtuber channel, Zoom sessions and even mysterious limbo-, environments to which various textures correspond: 2D and 3D animation, found footage, real shots , subjective camera in mini DV, Internet images or archives. Way, for the director, of take the worried measure of the present, leaving the teenager with the keys to the afterlife.

Strange this film, which keeps the hybrid but coherent DIY, Bonello opens it with an address to his daughter Anna. “The prologue is a short film that I shot eight months earlier by order of the Prada foundation, and which responded to another short film I made in 2014 in Beaubourg, whose form was a letter to my girlfriend. I had a retrospective there and was supposed to make a film titled Where are you?, quite a broad question, and I had chosen a form of retrospective letter. When this new order arrived I was like “why not repeat the same thing?” Six years have passed, it was an opportunity to say itwe are no longer in the same place. And then, it’s different talking to an 11-year-old girl than to an 18-year-old girl: there’s one thing that touched me a lot, and that we find again in the epilogue, which is that now the world belongs to him somewhere.“

A raft in the open sea

To arrive there, Coma follows tortuous paths, superimposing worlds after having interfered in the imagination of a little girl (Louise Labeque, already Zombie child), the prologue ends with a shot of the latter. The director says he got the idea of ​​this development by immersing himself in Gilles Deleuze’s conferences, and in particular in this excerpt where the philosopher states: “Beware of each other’s dream because if you get trapped in each other’s dream, you’re screwed“. “An extraordinary passage that immediately pushes you to do the opposite of what it says. I told myself that the film was just that: entering the other’s dream. And suddenly the device was simple: a little girl on a bed, like a raft out at sea, projecting herself. she allowed me to enter different worlds, each with their own aesthetics, and opened up a whole field of possibilities for narrative freedom. Which is great, but then the more one wants to be free, the more structured one has to be. It is the difference between freedom and absurdity. So, it required a lot of thinking, structural precision.”

And in fact, under its frenetic rhythms, zapping responds to a precise logic. “I work a lot with post-its, a brilliant inventioncontinues Bertrand Bonello. I put them on the wall and wonder what will cause interesting contrasts. I wanted to install the worlds little by little, they are very separate, the soap with Barbie, the cartoon where you imagine yourself, the youtuber Patricia Coma…, and then, these different worlds contaminate each other, to end up in this type of forest …A zapping that doesn’t only concern the image, but also the word, like when one of the soap characters imagined with Barbie stickers starts delivering tweets from… Donald Trump, meaning at half mast. “The access we have to everything, to all information, etc., requires us to be twice as smart, otherwise, in fact, it can lead to a loss of meaning. We really feel it all around us, the loss of meaning with the increase of all possibilities which ultimately are false possibilities.”

Pop and playful

However, and if you bathe in a necessarily gloomy climate in relation to the weather, Coma maintains a playful twist to which the director of The Apollonides little used to. “This device allowed me to be much more fun than usual, he nods. The fact that there is a youtuber character like Patricia Coma allows me to say funny things that are not easy to say with a real scene. I can put things into Barbie’s mouth that I couldn’t ask two actors to say because the scene would be ridiculous. it allowed me a humor less present in the other films: Coma it has a pop and playful side.Which does not prevent him from addressing essential questions, such as when the film introduces, through the “detector”, a very simple memory game -“I bought it on the Internet for 6 euros!“–that of free will.

Or, ultimately, an unusual and exciting object, even a reminder, afterwards Zombie child, Bertrand Bonello’s attachment to genre cinema: “Elements of it had already been found in Tiresias or The Apollonides, but, there, perhaps it is actually more affirmed, to go through the genre to free an imagination and also to have a somewhat political discourse. Genre cinema allows it, and it’s a direction I will continue to take.“Then inside The beasthis next project, “a fantastic melody over three periods, 1910, 2014 and 2044, with three slightly different genres, with a couple –Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, ed- that fails every time…”