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BERLINALE 2022 Encounters

Bertrand Bonello • Director of Coma

“Being 18 today - wow. Life starts in a world that feels crazy”

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- BERLINALE 2022: The French filmmaker talks us through his unnerving, abstract new work — a world of Zoom calls and eerie dreams

Bertrand Bonello • Director of Coma

Many major international filmmakers whose work typically premieres at festivals have made lockdown-related shorts over the past 18 months. Some have been fine; most confirm that Zoom, while useful, is not the future of cinematography. But Bertrand Bonello, usually at the cutting edge of things, has done them better and made a feature, focusing not so much on the public health circumstances, as on the way our minds began to fray in this new reality. He expanded on this and more in our chat on Coma [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bertrand Bonello
film profile
]
, his Berlinale Encounters-screened new film dedicated to and inspired by his teenage daughter.  

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Cineuropa: Do you remember the exact spark that brought this film to life?
Bertrand Bonello:
It came in two moments. First of all, the prologue to the film, the letter to my daughter: it was a short movie I did during the first lockdown for Fondazione Prada. It got a lot of very moving responses and reactions. Then, I had a feature project that was postponed for some pandemic-related reason. And I thought I should go for it. At that moment, I was listening to a Gilles Deleuze conference and alighted on this sentence: “never go into the dream of another person, it can be dangerous,” even if this one is a very nice young girl. So I had the film, at that moment: I will go into the dreams of others. And I just imagined the set-up of the film: a young girl alone on her bed, like a boat alone in the sea. It allowed me to invent different worlds, different textures and do a very hybrid and structured film at the same time, using found footage, real images, computer images, Zooms, animations. 

I’d be interested to hear you talk about the Patricia Coma character. Was she inspired by anyone in particular?
No, not really. But for me, having to create a character — an influencer, blogger — this character was really fascinating to me. Who are they? The stars before were singers, football players, actors — we knew who they were. But these people? They have some power. I think a character like that allowed me to explore many, many, many things. And also use humour.

You have these different worlds and the idea is that, as the film goes on, they all contaminate one another. For example, you have the talking dolls — it's very easy, it’s like a soap opera. Little by little, some of Patricia’s words come in, and that’s the construction of the film. At the beginning, she’s like, ok, here’s the weather; she’s selling this for the kitchen [a food processor with very Cronenbergian metal tongs]. Maybe she is only in the mind of the young girl — by the end, I’m not sure Patricia Coma really exists.  

What inspired the film’s eclectic visual style, which brings the narrative requirements of each strand to light so well? How did you balance it all in such a tight running time?
It’s a film that was made with very little money — without partners, as we wanted to be very free. I tried to find these concepts that were not necessarily cheap to shoot, but for example when you have the idea of a character like Patricia Coma, it’s just one character with a tripod, not moving. For the scenes in limbo [a woodland dream sequence that evokes David Lynch’s Inland Empire], I had an old camera with tapes in it, and I thought, “let’s try to find the texture with that.” All these things that were not very expensive helped give character to these worlds. 

On a more serious note, it feels like you’ve been thinking hard about what characterises Generation Z or Zoomers and the world they live in, so mediated by information and technology. And how they might define the next few decades as they come of age.
It’s not something I did on purpose, but it’s true that Nocturama [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bertrand Bonello
film profile
]
, Zombi Child [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bertrand Bonello
film profile
]
and Coma are now a kind of trilogy. Nocturama was more obviously political; on Zombi Child, I concentrated on young girls and their stories. Here in Coma, we go inside the head of one. It was maybe what was missing from this trilogy. And it’s true, I’m very interested in that. I have a daughter of that age — that’s one reason. But being 18 today, wow. Life starts in a world that feels crazy. The epilogue of the film — the second letter — is of course something very dark, talking about how in-between we are. But it is also something I want to say, as I believe in this generation, I trust them. Even if it’s going to be very difficult. It’s more about questions than answers. But I trust their intelligence and their feeling of the new world.

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