May the show begin! Amoral & Tasteful.
She is Conann (2023) is a fantasy romp through barbarism, gore and spitty lesbian snogs. It reminds me of a sort of queer love child of Holy Motors (2012) and Highlander (1986). Surreal! Time Jumps! Episodic! Grotesque characters on a journey towards the inevitable! It is shot primarily in black and white, with flashes of technicolour in moments of emotional intimacy, at the flash of a gunshot, or bloodied frenzy. Director Bertrand Mandico immerses the audience in a stunningly designed series of worlds, shunning CGI for old-school, low-fi prop making, eerie prosthetics and lusciously dressed sound stages – hefty budget lines for latex, fake blood and foil. The moment horns emerge out of Conann’s nipples, piercing the skin and erupting like seedlings made me shudder and somehow my mouth wet. We meet Conann at different ages of her life, each played by a different actor and each world has a different aesthetic feel, with different (sexy) costume languages to match. The script is haunting (and very quotable), poetic and disgusting in equal measure. Moments in the film have stuck in me, heavy, violent, confronting.
All things considered, you seem ripe
We meet Conann at 15 – a slim, doe-eyed, beautiful, white girl who seems to have no agency in anything that happens to her. She’s captured by barbarians, and held in an (unlocked) cage… When Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) tells her to, she opens her cage door and simply walks out and poisons everyone. I find the early iterations of Conann hard to feel empathy for or with, she’s a blushing young girl and her actions unfold before her, guided by the hands of Rainer or others around her. She is a victim of external forces! Blindly enacting brutal violence as she goes! We don’t see her scheming, desiring, thinking or transgressing. There’s an interesting passivity to the context of her shoving a sword down another woman’s throat, it dripping with guts and bile as she pulls it out. What agency can and does she have to fall or not fall into violence when that is all she has known? Another example of a pretty, femme, white woman refusing responsibility for her own story?
Over iterations she evolves from beautiful vessel to agent of her own death. Each time she evolves, she violently kills the younger version of herself – and there’s something irresistible about this – it feels easy to recognise the impulse to slay the version of you that was not strong enough, brave enough, good enough. Younger Conann doesn’t fight hard – why would you, when standing in front of an older, sexier, harder, well-dressed version of yourself? Yes, let me become her. But underneath the new costume and despite the new actor, there is still a strong sense of fatalism and self-obsession that follows the character, her worlds feel small and the camera rarely lets us zoom out. She’s stuck in these sound stages where others enter as fodder for her to kill – like putting mice in a snake tank.
You’re disgusting!
The film’s POV is often Rainer’s – in a pivotal shift, we’re told Conann has many years of bliss in the Bronx with her lover, but we don’t see that. We rejoin Conann’s story only when Rainer reappears. Rainer acts as guide, and narrator, a Faustian hellhound at the heels of Conann and audience. To see the film as Rainer’s story paints an emotive journey – he’s with us, portrayed by the same actor – from start to finish, and we’re offered flashes of genuine vulnerability, for example his disappointment that Conann can’t see his photographs as art, longing for her recognition and approval. We meet Rainer’s half sister – a ghoulish figure with a mic – an unexpected hint towards a past, a childhood. Conann is marketed as a queer film and Rainer is in many ways trans coded – uses he/him pronouns and is played by a female actor with a noticeably femme voice; in one moment he is thrilled to grow breasts, marking his transition to barbarian. He is also ostracised, derided and insulted consistently, his desire for closeness is rejected and he makes sneaky moves to steal Conann from the beautiful cis girlfriend – he is the evil demon that brings hell wherever he goes, his vulgar, inhuman face of a dog frequently fills the frame. His moments of vulnerability and pain – seen often only by the audience – bring him no empathy or kinship in his world. Only in death he discovers he has a heart, something the audience could feel long before he discovered its presence. It’s hard to watch. At times it feels like that often troped and relentless media portrayal of gender queer people as othered, unloved and unrecognised by those closest to them. But the film does give him a lot of time and space, we sit with him a lot, and there’s depth to his brilliant characterisation by Löwensohn – there’s a case to be made this is his film.
Blessed are the necrophiliacs never betrayed by their love
Another queer element of the film is the plentiful lesbian snogging – and the love between Conann & Sanja. They sign away their all their memories so they can be together outside of hell’s grasp (relationship goals?). The snogs – sometimes between Conann and her older/younger self – are often in the same grotesque language as puking blood, disembodied limbs – in one there’s a close-up of two tongues sloppy and sliding over each other. In the film, love is swiftly followed by betrayal, intimacy with cruelty (usually some variant of brutal murder of the lover). In the world of Conann, things are bad and get worse. In the queer canon, this is a well-trodden path – lesbians having a terrible time, someone watches the woman she loves die horribly. Here we get to see traumas march Conann towards ever more gruesome acts of violence, seemingly immune to the emotional impact of it all, she redirects that grief into making sure that everyone else feels a hell of a lot worse than she should. There’s something (not just the hair) that reminds me of the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. If inside you there are two wolves, one is Conann and one is San Junipero, choose (at your peril) which to feed.
Perhaps the time has come to disobey your mother, Conann
The film is rich in fluids – projectile vomiting huge quantities of blood, saliva dripping from cannibal mouths, teeth crunching down on ribs and flesh, milky gloop lacquering bodies, clots and guts sticking to freshly used swords. Even in black and white, Mandico lets us into the visceral pleasure/pain of cruelty. In many moments of violence, Conann has no regrets, few thoughts, a total disconnect from victim and context that allows us into the world of someone acting – on impulse? On desire? Or maybe just acting, just doing because she can, unrestricted by self control. Maybe that’s what got my heart rate up – what a fucking thrill it must be to just do. This ‘freedom’ is contrasted with the bookends of the film – Conann in hell, forced to eternally re-remember, re-find herself, re-play her story before forgetting and starting all over again. We see the horror and pain of re-meeting the worst parts of yourself, the grief of possibility as your actions are laid bare in front of you, unchanged, unflinching.
“A 14 berry coulis”
She is Conann is a rich, unpleasant, thrilling watch – it asks us to look at the parts of us we hope aren’t there and wouldn’t put on show. But a few days later, the images that still linger with me come from the very end of the film where the work speaks to something quite unexpected. The eldest Conann gathers a group of artists and tells them that she’s going to leave them her huge fortune – they’ll be set for life! They’ll be free to make the most radical art ever! They’ll finally have power and resource! But they have to eat her first. We watch them eat every last toe and pubic hair. The camerawork is sickening, the jewels stuffed into her eyeballs glisten, but it starkly brought me back to the real world conversations happening across the arts – who should artists or festivals accept or seek funding from (Baillie Gifford?) If you were offered power and resource to enact the change you make work about – would you take it, no matter where it came from? What makes a “consumable barbarian?”
LRG
Weird Weekend present She Is Conann on Friday 31st May, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.