Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bertrand Bonello
Starring: Louise Labeque, Julia Faure
The lockdowns of the COVID pandemic feel like a lifetime ago and yet
we're still seeing the release of films that were shot under those
restrictive conditions. While most of us were making sourdough bread and
wearing our PJs all day long, the world's filmmakers were busying
themselves by shooting whatever they could in the confines of their
homes. Bertrand Bonello was no different. In 2021 he
shot Coma in his home and a secluded forest. In contrast with most of the
filmmakers who did likewise, Bonello has created something worthwhile
here, a film that is often baffling, frequently entertaining and
ultimately touching.
Dedicated to his then 18-year-old daughter, Bonello's film is a father
expressing empathy for what young people were enduring at that specific
time, and the trials they face entering adulthood in this increasingly
uncertain post-pandemic landscape. It's the cinematic equivalent of a
father trying to heal their kid's anxieties by making shadow puppets on a
wall lit by flashes of lightning during an angry storm.
The film is centred on an unnamed teenager played by Bonello's Zombi Child star Louise Labèque. As was the case with most teens
during lockdown, she's bored senseless, seeking a way to escape the
mundanity of being stuck in her bedroom. She does this through Zoom calls
with her friends, during which they debate the merits of their favourite
serial killers. She imagines a soap opera being played out by her
childhood dolls, who come to life through stopmotion and are voiced by
French stars Laetitia Casta, Vincent Lacoste, Louis Garrel, Anaïs Demoustier and the late Gaspard Ulliel. She often dreams of being
trapped in a forest surrounded by strangers clad in what looks like the
eerie mask Ryan Gosling dons at the end of Drive. She becomes obsessed with Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), an online
influencer with the sinister, ethereal presence of a vampire in a Jean
Rollin movie. She seems to harbour suicidal feelings.
Coma plays out in what amounts to a series of vignettes, cutting between
the dollhouse soap opera, Patricia Coma's YouTube clips, and the
teenager's anxiety, both in the real world and the dream forest. Most of
it's played for (often cheap and crude) laughs, but the influencer subplot
grows increasingly disturbing as we realise the malign influence she's
having on the teen. A game called "The Revelator", which involves pressing
coloured buttons in a specific sequence, is sold by Patricia to the teen,
and it becomes a key prop in a philosophical diatribe about determinism.
Try as she might, the teenager finds she can't get the sequence wrong,
winning the game at every attempt. But when she's in the limbo forest she
finds she has the ability to fail. Patricia appears in the girl's dream,
telling her that only in this limbo state can she truly exercise free
will. As a counterpoint, Bonello adds a a clip of the philosopher Gilles
Deleuze intoning that you should avoid getting caught in someone else's
dream. The dream forest reminds us of Twin Peaks' Black Lodge, with its eternally trapped Laura Palmer, and we fear the
worst for the teenage girl.
A lot of viewers will dismiss Coma as pretentious and many will view it as a throwaway diversion made
to keep a filmmaker from going insane while the world was on pause. They
both might have a point, but there's a sincerity to Coma that can't be denied. This is a filmmaker exposing his fears as a
father, begging his daughter and the young people of the world not to give
up, not to fall under the dark spell of those who seek to profit from
their misery. He ends his film with Winston Churchill's quote, "If you're
going through Hell, keep going." Bonello's apprehensions seem so lucid
that I had to check if he had lost his daughter to suicide and this was a
letter delivered too late from a parent filled with regret, but thankfully
that isn't the case.
Amid all the passionate pleading and pseudo-philosophy is a striking turn
by Faure, an actress who has spent the past decade in minor roles but who
delivers a performance here that suggests she's destined for full-on movie
star status. It's easy to see why an impressionable teen might fall under
the spell of Patricia Coma, who as embodied by Faure is the very model of
confidence and glamour, but Bonello gives us a late image of Patricia that
suggests her taunting of her young audience masks her own insecurities.
Faure has collaborated with Quentin Dupieux with small roles in his
comedies Deerskin and Smoking Causes Coughing, and many of the comic touches of Coma feel inspired by Dupieux's absurdism. But Coma's darkest moments suggest Bonello is motivated chiefly by personal fears
and anxieties that no doubt persist in this post-lockdown world. We've
gone through Hell, and yet we still feel the heat on our backs.
Coma is on MUBI UK from July 26th..
