'She Is Conann': She Is Cuckoo
Writer/director Bertrand Mandico reimagines 'Conan the Barbarian' for people on LSD.
When I was in film school, one of my peers was this guy named Andy who made bizarre experimental films. He’d screen them for the class and the lights would come up and you could hear a pin drop, ‘cause no one knew how the hell to offer feedback. For awhile I thought that these films were pretentious and unskilled - if there’s no story, you can throw whatever the hell you want up on the screen and say it means just about anything and no one can really disagree, right? But then as I got to know Andy better, I realized that he had put thought into every strange detail of his non-story, and everything meant something to him. His films didn’t speak to me, but that doesn’t mean they were worthy of ridicule.
I thought about Andy a lot while watching She Is Conann, the new film from writer/directer Bertrand Mandico. There’s no narrative sense to be made of the movie, no characters in which one can become invested, and it sometimes made me laugh when I’m not sure whether or not it intended to be funny (one half of a polyamorous couple, upon finding their partner engaging in beastiality: “We said no animals!”). Does a scene where a 15-year-old version of the protagonist makes out with a 25-year-old version of the protagonist while glitter rains down around them and a dog-man in a bedazzled leather jacket and an ugly Cosby sweater photographs them “mean” something? Probably. I personally didn’t find the film engaging enough to give very much thought as to what it means, but who knows, maybe it would move you to tears. All art is subjective, but I truly don’t know by what metric to judge a film that is so very intensely on its own wavelength. It’s like trying to measure a Jackson Pollack painting against the work of Chuck Close; it’s not apples and oranges, it’s apples and vintage surgical equipment. You can’t even eat one of those things!
She Is Conann is getting people in the door by selling itself as a gender-swapped reimagining of Robert E. Howard’s iconic barbarian, but that’s a little misleading - anyone hoping for a female dressed like Arnold Schwarzenegger arguing that what is best in life is “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women” is gonna be disappointed.
I actually think the description threw me - I was watching the movie through that specific lens, assuming Mandico was trying to make some statement about machismo, but I think he’s actually using barbarism as a metaphor for the state of art in the modern world, maybe? Although honestly the movie could just as easily be an allegory for the life of the modern cheesemaker or a dentist who wants to be a dancer or salamanders from outer space. As I said, I’m not sure anyone knows what Mandico is going for here other than Mandico.
The movie follows Conann through various stages of her life, the settings and actresses portraying Conann changing with each new chapter. And the recasting isn’t just to age her up, either - for example, in one segment, she’s a bald Black woman, and in the next segment, she’s a a blonde faux-Nazi with the suspenders-over-nipples look of Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter. She is also, at various points, an adolescent forced to eat the body of her just-murdered mother, an old woman who forces other people to eat her newly-dead body, and a young woman with metal spikes for nipples. It’s a bit like I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ unorthodox biopic of Bob Dylan, only with a lot more impalings.
And did I mention the dog-man yet? His name is Rainer, he may or not be a devil or even the Devil, and he’s portrayed by Elina Löwensohn, who know from playing a gymnast in that one episode of Seinfeld. I’m not sure that you need to know all that, but I feel compelled to tell you regardless, because it’s one of the few concrete things I’m able to convey about the picture.
There’s a lot of violence in the movie, too, all practical, all gooey, none even remotely realistic. I kept think She Is Conann is like a Troma movie as directed by Leos Carax. If you knew those names without Googling them, perhaps She Is Conann is the movie for you.