Coma — first-look review

The tricky part of mak­ing a good pan­dem­ic movie is that the expe­ri­en­tial com­po­nents of the past two-and-a-half years — most­ly, an oscil­la­tion between wall-climb­ing tedi­um and uncer­tain ter­ror over soci­etal col­lapse or immi­nent wide­spread death — can’t be wres­tled into fea­ture-length nar­ra­tive struc­tures as read­i­ly as dra­mas of hard­ship or inspi­ra­tional uplift. With Bad Luck Bang­ing or Loony Porn, Radu Jude found a win­ning strat­e­gy by orga­niz­ing his satire of COVID-era absur­di­ties into episod­ic sketch­es, an approach repur­posed to even more dis­ori­ent­ing effect by Bertrand Bonel­lo in his atten­tion-deficit delight Coma.

What pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions may have com­pared to chan­nel-surf­ing scans here as clos­er to the dis­tract­ed, fid­gety fugue state entered dur­ing smart­phone usage. Bonello’s ded­i­ca­tion title card sin­gles out his teenaged daugh­ter (who’s also cred­it­ed with con­tribut­ing a paint­ing of Jeff Bezos, a sig­nif­i­cant fig­ure in this free-asso­cia­tive whirl­wind of moder­ni­ty), and his dis­joint­ed meth­ods emu­late such ado­les­cent time-sucks as scrolling Tik­Tok or flip­ping back and forth between apps to scrounge for anoth­er minute’s worth of fresh content.

One such young girl labeled only as Young Girl (Louise Labèque) curates the playlist of dreams, fan­tasies, and YouTube clips that fill out the eighty well-por­tioned min­utes of a film too thought­ful to be dis­missed as a lark made to keep busy in lock­down. Though that’s the pre­cise con­di­tion cap­tured with stilled con­cen­tra­tion and Dadaist humor as our name­less pro­tag­o­nist amus­es her­self dur­ing quar­an­tine and, as did we all, grad­u­al­ly los­es her grip on normalcy.

With­out much in the way of com­pa­ny, she staves off soli­tude by form­ing a paraso­cial rela­tion­ship with the fab­u­lous Patri­cia Coma (Julia Fau­re), a lifestyle vlog­ger push­ing extra-strength blenders capa­ble of mak­ing a hot soup from raw veg­eta­bles. Over time, her mono­logues to cam­era stray in increas­ing­ly abstract direc­tions, expound­ing on prin­ci­ples of deter­min­ism then test­ed by the Young Girl in futile efforts at self-harm she finds her body won’t car­ry out.

This notion of celebri­ty, both blasé in its no-bud­get lack of glitz and all-con­sum­ing in its poten­tial to inspire obses­sion, seeps into the psy­chol­o­gy of the Young Girl and reit­er­ates itself in her oth­er activ­i­ties. On a group Zoom with some gal­pals, they dis­cuss their favorite ser­i­al killers as if it’s a debate over which mem­ber of BTS is dreami­est; she casts her Bar­bie dolls in elab­o­rate soap operas brought to life by stop-motion ani­ma­tion, and then makes them digress into recita­tions of Trump tweets or play­act­ed incest fan­tasies. She absorbs and scram­bles cul­ture, remak­ing it in her own fluc­tu­at­ing, dis­af­fect­ed image.

If this sug­gests the image of synaps­es fir­ing wild­ly due to under-stim­u­la­tion, then the dark side to that grab-bag of men­tal response comes by night, when night­mares shot in first-per­son tod­dle through dark, sin­is­ter woods to the sound of blood­cur­dling shrieks. The dai­ly agen­da of non sequiturs and ennui comes to look clos­er to a sur­vival response, a way to keep the brain occu­pied until enough hours have been whiled away that a return to bed has been duly earned. This rare com­bi­na­tion of numb­ing days punc­tu­at­ed by the occa­sion­al spike of pet­ri­fied inten­si­ty cuts to the core of the COVID zeit­geist, but also has the nifty addi­tion­al effect of induc­ing the state it describes, its stream of con­scious­ness sink­ing the view­er into a low­er wake­ful­ness. (Hence the title?)

Bonel­lo him­self intro­duces the film with a lofti­ly aca­d­e­m­ic voiceover accom­pa­nied by footage from his own Noc­tura­ma, the gist being that he con­sid­ers this project a ​“ges­ture” rather than cin­e­ma as we know it. My first thought was that this phrase talks around the caveat that Coma is a minor work pro­duced more as the real­iza­tion of a thought exper­i­ment, as opposed to the offi­cial Next Movie (sci-fi romance with Léa Sey­doux due next year) he had to put on hold. This couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth, the dead­pan lev­i­ty and razor-edged aware­ness of Gen Z’s present both notable new dimen­sions to the cor­pus of a beguil­ing, unpre­dictable virtuoso.