Coma 
Written and directed by Bertrand Bonello
Starring Louise Labèque, Julia Faure, Ninon François
Not rated
Runtime: 82 minutes
Opens at the New York Roxy Cinema May 17

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

In Coma, director Bertrand Bonello has managed to capture the information age’s endemic paralysis: the overwhelming options leading to deadlock. It is, as such, a difficult film to talk about. It’s important in the way great art can be. Leaving aside the big questions of our time, it also feels important, in that adolescent misrecognition of the world. The overabundance of energy with no outlet forces us into a young woman’s kinetic imagination and a stochastic cluster of jokes and absurdities, prophecies and conjurings. 

In an early scene in Zombi Child, Bonello’s previous film, a history teacher tells his students that it is difficult to write a history of the 19th century, for the 19th century was the century of history. In turn, we must ask, will we ever be able to surveil the 21st century, the century of surveillance?

Immersed in the consciousness of a singular unnamed teen, Coma is fragmented by necessity. It reflects the world of “the attention economy” and algorithms driving us towards personalized, fundamentally incomplete bubbles to keep us clicking. The unnamed girl (Louise Labèque, also the star of Zombi Child) is alone in her apartment; there is no rhythm governing her life other than Youtube and the occasional Zoom meetup. She gazes down at her long-outgrown doll set, hearing a plastic couple argue, not playing so much as siphoning off excess melodrama. These monotonies overwhelm the senses and drive her towards new registers of repetition. 

To keep her company, there is the 1080p presence of lifestyle influencer Patricia Coma (Julia Faure). As with any content creator worth her salt, Coma is content with nothing but the viewer’s full attention, and this means becoming something of a renaissance woman. Supposedly, hers is a weather channel, but the reporting has long since been integrated into a broader pop nihilist project (Coma, as well as Bonello’s latest, The Beast, have merited comparisons to weather Youtuber David Lynch). Temperatures above fifty celsius hardly matter when you aren’t going outside anyway. 

Coma’s solutions come with affiliate links: an ersatz Simon called the Revelator where you are incapable of losing and a blender that heats vegetables for soup without cooking them. These are mysteries relayed in de-camped glamour, glitches in the matrix present to keep us domesticated. 

Consider Coma reporting, foregrounding her greenscreen. She doesn’t know where you are, but you can find yourself on the map. Here is the essence of parasocial excess, the clothless empress addressing at once nobody and everybody at once. The only time the girl goes outside, we see her through a four-quadrant security feed. A pair of mysterious voices reveal nothing but their interest in her. It is important that she remains in view. There is a paranoia beneath her situational imagination. In an essay on Hans Christian Andersen, Daniel M. Lavery writes how the children’s author “prepared me to be a god. Everything around you is alive and bursting with unrequited love and it’s your fault, or at least your responsibility—what are you going to do about it?” The teen’s parasocial life is a sort of calling from the inanimate world, from below. The girl has a visceral, non-interventional power: to watch herself win at the Revelator, to watch a Ken doll contemplate infidelity. 

Coma is not a despondent film. If we are all comatose, then we still can dream, and Bonello sees danger to a society that has foreclosed all acts but looking when a dream blurs into waking life. Forays into undelineated pastel animation give somatic depth to the girl’s loneliness.

There is a foreword and afterword by Bonello, his words appearing over silent montages. He addresses his eighteen-year-old daughter and tells her about a movie he wanted to make for her that captured “the smallest, the craziest, the most beautiful gesture. Like love.” Now, little in Coma is so self-evident, but the form manages to capture a rare naïvité. In being so fixated on each concept, each atomized quality of teen girlhood, the stitches become visible. The director’s hand never quite leaves, and what is an act of love if not that reaching and bridging of empty time?

It was around when one of the dolls started speaking in Donald Trump tweets that I felt the need to look up the definition of bathos. If you’re as unsure as I was, bathos is the sharp dive (bath?) from high drama to the mundane. Coma starts earth-shattering and, at some point, goes deadpan. It is all over the Richter scale; yet, there is always a current of earnestness running through. The only way to confront the uncertain future is with uncertainty itself.