New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 1

Coma (Bertrand Bonello)

Bonello's latest is somewhat of a disappointment coming after so much successive excellence (Saint Laurent, Zombi Child, Nocturama, etc). Filmed in Bonello's home in January 2021, Coma is an 81-minute collage meant to evoke the disorienting suck of staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are animated sequences, a soap opera played out via pixilated dolls (one of whom is voiced by Gaspard Ulliel, who played Saint Laurent for Bonello and who died at 37 in a skiing accident this January), videos of a YouTube influencer named Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), a Zoom call between several teen girls debating the coolest serial killer, a Simon-like memorization game meant to while away the hours/remind us that we have no free will, a forest where the living and the dead mingle, text messages, FaceTimes, more. Phrases uttered by one entity will get repeated by another. One of the dolls starts spouting Trumpisms. Bonello dedicates this stream-of-consciousness sprawl to his then-18-year-old daughter Anna, represented by the similarly aged Louise Labèque (of Zombi Child fame), as an acknowledgment of the difficulties of remaining at home at such a formative age. It's all a bit trite, especially the last sequence in which Bonello implores Anna to stay strong over images of ecological disaster. But, horizontally, it triumphs. You can ignore the vertical platitudes and bask in the perverse structure. Still, here's hoping his next project, a free adaptation of Henry James' 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, synthesizes his best tendencies.

Grade: A-minus