Promantic French filmmakers are supported by their national industry and even their lock-in projects are met with respectful attention. Earlier this year Olivier Assayas’ autofiction Hors du Temps, or Suspended Time, premiered in Berlin – a dreamy Covid-era indulgence that he almost got away with. Now we have a chance to see Bertrand Bonello’s brooding sketch Coma: a lockdown essay that preceded his brilliant futuristic film The Beastwith many of the same ideas and tropes.
Coma broods over a terrifying, affectless future in which humanity will evolve away from the primacy of love and selfhood, and in which sexuality and violence will then be prominent as a symptom of the need to feel something, anything. As so often, Bonello sees people as mere dolls or puppets; stuffed mammalian forms whose supposed individuality is a ridiculous fiction. Here a teenage girl (Louise Labèque) grumbles steadfastly in her bedroom, driven half mad by lockdown boredom; the film’s title suggests the slow hibernation we’ve all gone through.
She follows a YouTuber named Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), an elegant philosopher who relieves herself of disturbing maxims, such as Emil Cioran‘s line: “It’s not worth killing yourself, since you always let yourself be killed.” Coma’s merchandise includes a strange toy called the Revelator, an impossible-to-get-wrong color-guessing game that defies the laws of physics, cognition, and probability. The girl video calls five friends who entertain themselves by discussing which serial killer is their favorite. In the middle of the conversation, a male figure comes up behind one of them and her image disappears. The action is interspersed with puppets performing a photo-love melodrama of sexual frustration and loneliness, perhaps inspired by Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
There are glimpses of the same fear and revelation that made The Beast so fascinating, but it’s mainly unfocused and undisciplined, and the isolation of each character simply drains the film of oxygen.
