2023-05-19 23:30:06
FILMMAKERS’ FORTNIGHT
Films at Cannes are often said to crystallize a “state of the world”, but rarer are those that lean into the other world, travel through limbo or unconscious territories. This is the whole vocation of the Orphic and occultist cinema of the black magician Bertrand Mandico, back on the Croisette to present his new madness named Conan. Author, since 1997, of a myriad of charms in short formats, the man has only recently moved on to the long template, with The Wild Boys (2017).
Feminine reinterpretation of the heroic fantasy myth born from the pen of Robert E. Howard in 1932, popularized in a muscular version by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film by John Milius (Conan the Barbarians1982), Conan immediately appears as the most accomplished, to date, of his three feature films, the most furious too. This cannot be explained so much by an influx of means, Mandico practicing a hand-stitched craft, brooded in the studio. But, by transposing his spells onto a theater stage, the filmmaker seems to have found a new favorite place, as well as an even more fulminating laboratory.
Car Conan originally emanates from a show project, at the invitation of the Nanterre-Amandiers Theater (Hauts-de-Seine), smashed on the wall by the health crisis. From the thigh of this piece, captured behind closed doors, came a parallel scenario, shot in stride, this time in a disused Luxembourg foundry, which retains the memory of the set.
Springboard to the imagination
The scene is above all phantasmagorical. It takes place in the non-place of the Underworld, where Conann lands, who attends the story of his life, in six ages and in six incarnations, camped by as many different actresses (let us quote them all in ascending order of age: Claire Duburcq, Christa Theret, Sandra Parfait, Agata Buzek, Nathalie Richard and Françoise Brion). His latest version thrones almighty as the monarch of death, while a dog-headed Scapin, called Rainer (Elina Löwensohn in a brilliant transformist performance, her face swallowed up under a canine mask), plays the Charons in the labile mysteries of his destiny.
Thrown as a child on the trails, Conann is captured by a barbarian gang which integrates her by forcing her to kill her mother and taste her flesh. Raised as a fierce warrior, the recruit will lead the horde. We will find her, each time more bloodthirsty, here as a tenant of a devastated New York, there on the front lines of a devastating war, finally as a distinguished guest offering herself to the feast of her guests, a universal allegory of betrayal and chaos.
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