Coma

Conceived as a concerned, exhilaratingly convoluted letter to his adolescent daughter, Bertrand Bonello’s COMA taps into the experiences of an unnamed teenage girl during the lockdown to explore the pressures exerted on an entire generation. Confined in a Parisian flat with her parents nowhere to be seen, each day blurs into the next for the young protagonist, there’s little for her to do other than lounge on the bed, speak to friends on FaceTime and catch up on the latest video from YouTube influencer Patricia Coma.
The device she ordered from Coma is another way of passing the time, a cheap plastic game called the Revelator which never lets you lose, as is imagining romantic entanglements between those who inhabit the dollhouse that’s still in her room, tempestuous Barbies and Kens brought to life via stop-motion animation.
But as days turn to weeks and each pastime bleeds into the others, violence starts seeping into everything too: brutal jealousy, a hand inserted into a food processor, a Zoom call intruder, a shadowy forest by night. Perhaps that’s the true horror of the pandemic: everything we see, everything we watch, everything we imagine, everything we dream, it’s all the same. There’s no escape. (James Lattimer)

In the presence of Julia Faure.

Bertrand Bonello: QUI JE SUIS – D’APRÈS PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (1996, K), QUELQUE CHOSE D’ORGANIQUE (1998), LE PORNOGRAPHE (2001), TIRESIA (2003), DE LA GUERRE (2008), L’APOLLONIDE (SOUVENIRS DE LA MAISON CLOSE) (2011), INGRID CAVEN, MUSIQUE ET VOIX (2012), SAINT LAURENT (2014), NOCTURAMA (2016), ZOMBI CHILD (2019)