‘Coma’: Bertrand Bonello’s Latest Is An Unforgiving, Nightmarish Blast [Berlin Film Festival]

Love letters rarely include knock-off Barbie dolls engaging in incest, but the conventional is often off the table when it comes to French director Bertrand Bonello. “Coma,” Bonello’s latest, begins with a miscellanea of incongruent images, zoomed in and blurred, an amalgamation of amorphous shapes that exacerbates the sharpness of the accompanying words. This twisted byproduct of the mind of an anxious parent is dedicated to the director’s daughter, 18-year-old Anna, who, like many others, has found herself locked in her bedroom during some of the most formative years of her life. 

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Embodying Anna is a nameless young woman played by “Zombi Child” lead Louise Labeque. Her walls are covered in memorabilia, Gottfried Helnwein’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams hovering over her head, James Dean gazing into the unknown, cold hands tucked deep into the pockets of a black coat, a cigarette casually hanging out of his mouth. The actor, the epitome of teenage disillusionment, provides fitting imagery to this nihilistic endeavor as “Coma” explores yet another generation of youngsters wobbling far too close to the edges of the darkest pits of despair. 

Inside the young woman’s digital gadgets lives flamboyant YouTuber Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), whose channel is intended to “help you live better.” Better, of course, being entirely subjective, as even the act of living itself is repeatedly refuted by the skeptic influencer. Looking to make an extra buck, Coma profits off selling a rip-off version of 1970s mnemonic game Simon christened the Repeater. The game’s goal is the same – to faithfully reproduce a sequence of colors for as many rounds as one’s memory allows – alas, the Repeater is not so much of a toy as an allegory to the existence (or, better, absence) of free will. 

Dancing to a Nietzschean waltz, this ever-shifting visual essay is drenched in pessimism, communicating despondency through a potpourri of animation, stop motion, and screen-on-screen to poke and prod at the most nefarious ripples of social isolation. When void of occupations, the mind wanders, and, here, the final destination is always the cruelest, most twisted imaginable. The young woman spends countless afternoons sat by a dollhouse as an adultery-ridden soap opera unfolds, the characters posing complex existential musings to the cacophonous sounds of sitcom laughter – the dissonance is as unsettling as it is comical. 

Scott, the plastic Don Juan, is voiced by the late Gaspard Ulliel, who worked with Bonello on the 2014 biopic “Saint Laurent.” Ulliel’s voice reproduces the spew profaned by Donald Trump in between bouts of declaring undying love for his betrayed partner and aggressively shagging his sister, who begs him for something that “feels good,” a sordid political bacchanalia straight out of a Marquis de Sade novella. Scott is a walking browser history tab, fluctuating between conspiracy theories and shouting that Robert Pattinson deserved better than Kristen Stewart. If anyone asked him what shape the Earth is, his answer would be a flat “flat.”

Yet, there is something oddly comforting in this disturbing essay’s willingness to bring to the fore what lingers deep within our anxiety-plagued society. If a friend fails to answer a call, the only possible conclusion is that she has been brutally murdered, her body ripped apart as the beeps on the phone grow longer and longer. Sleep is a fertile land to the bountiful seeds of cataclysmic concerns, eyelids rolling down, panic taking over – climate change is far beyond the point of no return, fascism is rising at an unstoppable pace, children are starving, the housing crisis is late-night entertainment to money-hungry moguls. 

In Bonello’s tale, the life of a young woman is a hellish philosophical problem consisting of either submitting themselves to the unavoidable cruelty that lies in every man or surrendering at last to the siren chants of self-killing. In this, he composes a warped lullaby, inviting his daughter into the forlornest corners of his anguish to tell her it is ok to believe the world to be a Jigsaw-concocted trap. “How bad can it get?” he asks, again and again, holding Anna’s hand as they navigate amplified melancholy. It is, in a sense, a great act of love to forgo the barriers raised by self-preservation to dive headfirst into the most haunting nooks of the subconscious, all in the name of offering a slither of comfort to someone – a beautifully deranged display of altruism. 

An unforgiving, nightmarish blast, “Coma” is a cinematic bout of irritable bowel syndrome, afflicting yet unavoidable, disgustingly painful until it finally meets the joy of relief. Hope, drained entirely out of Bonello’s creation, returns as he signs off his love letter to Anna, allowing himself the indulgence of picturing a world made better because of his daughter, her choices far less important than the great miracle of her existence. In an oversaturated market for pandemic-themed films, “Coma” is a delirious marvel of a reminder that, in the right hands, there is no such thing as an unfeasible subject. [B+]

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