It’s not just death that comes for us; it’s every version of the future which subsists on a diet of our devoured past. Bertrand Mandico turns his Incoherence Manifesto toward Robert E. Howard, queer iconography and the nature of aging in his new film, SHE IS CONANN.
For those unfamiliar with it Mandico and Katrin Olafsdottir’s 2012 Incoherence Manifesto seemed to not simply be a response to the rising grandiosity of blockbuster filmmaking but also to the increasingly niche hyper realism favored in indie film. It was a series of 12 tenets to adhere to during film production in order to produce a result that is “unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike.”
The manifesto states, “The film must be in an uncertain geography, timeless, ban any realistic effect” and “Films must be hybrids containing at least two genres.” It’s easy to see how Robert E. Howard’s character who was at different times a slave, thief, gladiator, pirate, and king would be a perfect fit for the Incoherence Manifesto. Long before Mandico got to Conan, the stories would bounce between adventure, mystery, horror, and romance. The dreamy, ephemeral quality of Cimmeria and the Hyborean Age easily honoring the demand for uncertain geography and timelessness.
In Mandico’s SHE IS CONANN the titular hero may not follow Howard’s professional progression for the character, but the shifts they experience in their life are radical. At 15, Conann (Claire Duburcq) is a captured slave girl made to eat her own mother’s flesh if she wants to live; at 25, she’s a warrior embarking on an adventure that most closely resembles a peplum movie; at 35, she’s a stuntwoman wandering a Remodernist version of the Bronx in 1998 that would feel right at home in Amos Poe’s ALPHABET CITY; at 45, she’s a cruel commandant ruling over dilettantes lounging in a pool of blood and marching past a network of graves that resemble Powell & Pressburger’s matte paintings; lastly, at 55, she’s a wealthy socialite planning her suicide by cannibalism in a sequence that feels equal parts Paul Bartel and Peter Greenaway.
These sections are not presented as explicitly separate vignettes divided by simple title cards. Instead, the shifts from one period to the next are triggered when the next iteration of Conann slays the previous one. Mandico uses these moments before Conann slays her younger self to externalize Conann’s interiority regarding self. At the first such transition the approaching 25-year-old Conann is shot with a softer focus while Debussy’s Claire de Lune swells. This allows for Mandico to visually convey Conann romanticizing her own future. A later iteration of herself will flee the incoming new version capturing the relatable fear of the future.
As SHE IS CONANN bounces from genre to genre and lead to lead it is held together cohesively by two things. First, adopting an aesthetic that insists that it is queer and femme in every way. Every actor in the film is femme presenting and the production design is built to reflect the reality of a world of entirely queer women. At one point, Conann is stalking through calf deep water in a sculpture garden filled with statues of women while literally holding a sword whose blade has been covered in glitter. Mandico’s fascination with gender performance dominates every frame and a variety of queer influences are readily apparent.
Second, a single character is played by the same actor throughout every age of Conann’s life. Witness, guide, and interloper, Rainer (Elina Löwensohn), a dog faced man, guides and misleads Conann in equal measure. Löwensohn is a longtime collaborator of Mandico and they’re 13 years into a planned 21 year-long arc of short films starring Löwensohn. She’s intimately familiar with what he wants as a director and her character, Rainer, is played beneath a full-face prosthetic. With the Incoherence Manifesto’s insistence that all dialogue be recorded as ADR in post, Löwensohn has greater available elasticity in how she can render her performance because of how the prosthetic disguises her facial expressions. This is especially used to great effect during the sequence where Conann is 35 with Löwensohn often seesawing between realism and presentation style from line to line. Like Conann, the audience is never fully able to get a bead on Rainer.
Though only Mandico’s third feature, it feels like everything clicked here in a very satisfying way. Filmed in a massive, closed steel foundry in Luxembourg, Mandico had the space and resources to build all of his sets in a single contiguous location. The lack of open sky, frequent dreamy and drifting crane shots and room to build the large complex sets he favors allow Mandico to achieve the otherworldly quality he reaches for in each film.
Though certainly not the case in Howard’s original Conan work, later derivative novels, comics, and John Milius’s film pushed the character into a realm of hypermasculinity. Uncoupling the character from that allows for Conann to be more than they’ve been in years. This very queer film about how we devour our past is well worth your time.
SHE IS CONANN hits blu ray May 7, 2024.
them, not even once. When he’s not disappointing his cats he’s watching and writing about film.
His interests run toward naturalism, SOV and forgotten thrillers. Against his better judgment he
has hosted a podcast, Impossible Coin, for six years.
Tags: Alphabet City, Amos Poe, Bertrand Mandico, Cimmeria, Claire Duburcq, Elina Lowensohn, Hyborean Age, Incoherence Manifesto, John Milius, Katrin Olafsdottir, Paul Bartel, Peter Greenaway, Queer, Queerness, Robert E. Howard, She Is Conann
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