In Hell’s green room, the drinks are not free. But try telling that to the demon dog Rainer (Löwensohn); he’s otherwise occupied with readying himself and his guest for an audience with underworld royalty. The guest is an elderly woman stricken with amnesia, but also, she is Conann (Brion). And this underworld royalty, who sits upon a throne in a cave of shadows? She is Conann (and also Brion). Doppelgängers brought together by this trickster imp Rainer to retrieve the memories and stories, the saga, of “the most barbaric of barbarians.” If you’re familiar with French provocateur Bertrand Mandico’s previous work, After Blue, for example, you know his latest film She Is Conann is no mere gender-swapped take on author Robert E. Howard’s famous warrior king. It is instead a mind-melting, time-traveling, corpse-eviscerating manifesto on the price of vengeance, a visually stunning film that doesn’t wallow in excess, because that implies sloth. No, She Is Conann slithers in excess with relentless intent.
Not content with doubles, Mandico has six actors play Conann at different times in her life through various eras. In order to continue, the older Conann must kill her younger self (the preferred method, it seems, is a dagger thrust through the mouth). This is explained by Rainer, Conann’s constant companion across eternity. Witness, instigator, oracle, and shutterbug, he’s a one-headed Cerberus in a leather jacket whose dark romanticism comes from his namesake (Fassbinder more than Rilke, but as they say, why not both?). But barbarism begins at home, which in this case looks like it may be ancient Sumeria, where Conann’s mother is decapitated by the red-haired barbarian Sanja (Riedler), and young Conann (here, Duburq) vows revenge as she’s taken into slavery. But Rainer prophesizes that “who refuses to embrace the enemy can claim no revenge,” and Conann betrays herself by falling madly in love with Sanja. Selling their souls for a memory wipe (amnesia again) and dropped into the Bronx of the late Nineties, the pair enjoy a blissful existence until an older Conann shows up to take over.
The older Conann gets, the more barbaric she becomes, and the more Mandico’s themes coalesce around the perpetual cycle of the old eating the young, with the Conann polymorphs murdering each other (themselves?) being the most prominent example: but also the barbarism of betraying the ideals one once had, the barbarism of the opportunism in cynical capitalism, and passing on this “viral” barbarism to the youth, as evidenced in a third-act set piece I won’t get into, but which owes a debt to the one Peter Greenaway film that everyone’s familiar with. She Is Conann is a politically charged, blood-, sex-, and tears-soaked sword, carving through the helpless arteries to the heart of cinematic mediocrity, and it is Mandico’s strongest vision yet. As one character puts it, eloquently dismissing her corrupted peers, “Farewell, detritus.”
This article appears in February 2 • 2024.