Кома (Coma)

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Bertrand Bonello’s daughter has just turned 18. But the moment this young adult officially begins to “spread her wings” coincides with a global health crisis. Locked indoors, she experiences life in a state of limbo. In between reveries and video chats with her friends, she follows an influencer named Patricia Coma. A device she buys from her, called a “revelator”, leads her to question how much free will she actually has.

 

One of the sharpest minds in French cinema today, Bonello was bound to treat us with a commentary on the pandemic. What comes as a surprise is the dark humour in Coma. Poised somewhere between essay and fantasy, this cinematic anomaly sheds light on his fatherly efforts to connect with his daughter’s predicament and mirrors widespread anxiety about our children’s future. Making use of ever-changing formats that include animation and stop-motion, observations abound on global warming, geopolitics and our seeming inability to analyse what we see. Odd obsessions, nefarious role models and harmful perceptions of gender relations – there are many reasons why virtual life can terrify a parent. Unless, like Bonello, you know that trust is the most important gift you can bestow on your child.

ICS 5/5

More than just another lockdown movie on what a father fears for his daughter in this tormented COVID era, Coma is a flamboyant testimony to the right to dream, no matter what, in our current world. What initially started as just a small project during lockdown prior to embarking on his long-time project The Beast with Lea Seydoux and Gaspard Ulliel turned out to be Bonello’s most personal and intimate film yet.

The film oscillates between heterogeneous moods and modes, be they aesthetic, formal or thematic, but nonetheless achieves the miracle of being constantly captivating whilst maintaining its through line of love, fear of our current times, and the question of determinism.

Its numerous dream sequences in a hostile forest abound with eerie flashes are at times reminiscent of Inland Empire or Philippe Grandrieux’s somber Despite the Night. Mixing Robert Spahalsky’s confessions with Zoom sessions on serial killer stories between six young girls and Gilles Deleuze’s 1987’s conference at La Femis where he claimed that one should never get caught in another’s dream, combining excerpts of Henri George Clouzot’s L’Enfer starring Romy Schneider with a game called The Revelator that “is proving to you that you don’t control your choices”, a direct reference to the 80s cult game Simon the Sorceror, and having last but not least the luminous Louise Labeque dancing to Andrea Laszlo De Simone’s “Solo un uomo“, the film is a never ending firework that glues the spectator to his or her seat.

Despite the blatant emotional heaviness of the narrative, the film is not devoid of moments of unbridled comedy, reaching its climax with sequences in which dolls act out scenes between sitcom characters Sharon (Laetita Casta) and Scott (the late Gaspard Ulliel, whose smooth voice cannot but break our heart)

Coma is a neo-Lynchian slow burn masterpiece that will wow those willing to embark on its tumultuous journey with its mise en abymes and epiphanies of visual ecstasy.

Cineuropa

Bertrand Bonello offers up a spellbinding experimental film, a handcrafted work of creative genius made very freely, during a time of lockdowns and of mental escape into the depths

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Michael Sicinski (In Review Online)

Bonello bookends Coma with rather direct, first-person addresses to his daughter, wherein he explains his frustration as a parent, witnessing Anna going through the loneliness and anxiety of the pandemic but being unable to really help her. As he explains somewhat obliquely, this is really just a more attenuated version of every parent’s experience, of seeing your child move into a world that is decidedly not yours, one you cannot control and often cannot understand. In a sense, Coma is Bonello’s attempt to create concrete metaphors for both his daughter’s psychological states and his own inability to fully grasp them.

Bonello perfectly captures the anxiety each generation feels with respect to the next one, their own children. Not only have we brought them into a world on the brink of collapse — ecological, economic, political – but we cannot offer them any tools to navigate this world. Covid, then, can seem merely an accelerant for an apocalypse already well begun. Adding to our fears is the fact that the Internet has assumed the role that we cannot. We have no answers, and into that void step any number of gurus and influencers, promising to make sense of the universe, through heightened materialism, conspicuous minimalism, neo-fascist fantasies, and so on.

Coma suggests that people forced to become young adults in this era are aching for some palpable reality, but often confuse affect with danger. As the girl and her friends chat about their favorite serial killers, we see that mortality is always hovering in front of them, as an opportunity to feel something at long last.

Bonello has described Coma as a film about a teenager who “has a special power: she can bring us into her dreams — but also her nightmares.” But of course, he is really describing cinema itself, a mechanism for visualizing our hopes and fears, in the hope that making them public property could serve as a point of human connection. Bonello obviously understands that the cinema, as such, is over – that this is not how our children share their dreams. Coma offers no solutions, but suggests that even if parents and children, cinema and TikTok, free choice and the algorithm, represent incommensurate worlds, forging even a flawed connection between them is our own hope against complete alienation.