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BERLINALE 2022 Encounters

Review: Coma

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- BERLINALE 2022: 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

Review: Coma
Louise Labeque in Coma

What does a great artist do when a modern plague grinds the world to a halt and puts his great projects on hold? He creates something with what is available to him, and if his name is Bertrand Bonello, the result is vivid proof that an alchemist of images and of the psyche needs very little to manufacture top-notch work, even in the most audacious fields — in those depths where the craziest people look to be the wisest; in the fog of dreams where travellers of the spirit escape from contemporary excesses, to the risk of disappearing entirely. Such is the playful and arcane project of Coma [+see also:
trailer
interview: Bertrand Bonello
film profile
]
, unveiled in the Encounters competition of the 72nd Berlinale. This completely experimental film sounds the depths of existence and, confined yet interconnected, reflects on the question of free will in a world of control, of suggestive fears and of terrible hunger for power.  

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If all this sounds very enigmatic to you, that is normal, because nothing is normal when a young woman (Louise Labeque) faces isolation, confined in her apartment, vacillating between extreme boredom and the relief of escaping from others’ looks and judgement. She thus finds herself at the mercy of her own fluctuating thoughts, hypnotic soap operas (represented in the film by a dollhouse with Barbie dolls and a Ken doll talking in sentimental vaudevilles, a laugh track punctuating their conversations), the YouTube channel from guru Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), the “Free Zone” of dreams (a distressing forest in black and white) and zoom chats with girlfriends where all compare the merits of various serial killers. An interlocking of different levels and scales which the director passes through the developer (by repeating sequences with four types of signals) in order to go deeper into the subconscious, to the risk of losing one’s soul. 

It is an invisible, poetic, philosophico-chaotic map that Bertrand Bonello draws in Coma, an immersive experience of recentring of the self between life and death, a fragmentary essay about change, an indirect portrait of a young generation suffering, a cryptic dispatch of coded messages preparing for dawn at the heart of the cannibalistic night of the world, “things it is impossible to see elsewhere and which others will not see.” Bringing together diverse formal approaches (even animation), the director (who also created the excellent score) takes hold of experimental cinema with a perceptive and prophetic use of telescoping ideas, bound to fascinate his admirers and all adventurous and open minds. Those baffled by Coma, will no doubt get another chance in the future to rewatch what will inevitably become a cult film.

Produced by Les Films du Bélier, My New Picture and Remembers Production, Coma is sold internationally by Best Friend Forever.

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(Translated from French)

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