Verdict
Summary
The film very much has a hand made feel to it, glittery, and made-with-passion, but it has no real sense of true cinema to it, and it’ll never approach a mainstream audience because it’s too stubborn and too adamantly an outsider of a film to be a gift to anyone who really loves movies. It’s for a very small audience, but I can’t imagine even that audience would want to watch it a second time.
Plot:
Conann, a barbarian, lives through the ages, immortal, but not immune to suffering.
Review:
In a landscape where only women and mutant monsters seem to exist, a conqueror captures a young barbarian girl named Conann (Claire Duburcq) and forces her to become a cannibal, feasting on the flesh of her own mother. A dog-faced mutant man named Rainer (played by a female, Elina Lowensohn) looks on and begins an eras-long quest to chronicle the plight of Conann through her travails and her victories, bloody and horrific as they may end up becoming. Conann matures under captivity, becoming a figure of strength, as she passes from one stage of her life into another, often literally passing the torch to her future self, played by different actresses who sometimes look radically different to the previous incarnation. Conann becomes a victorious lover and free-roaming slayer (played by Christa Theret), a black and bald, but brave and romantic stuntwoman (played by Sandra Parfait) in Hollywood, then morphs into a Nazi (played by Agata Buzek) with a lust for power, and then finally an older woman (Nathalie Richard) who is no longer fit for battle, but for the laying down of arms (literally) when her hordes of followers feast on her flesh at the point of her death. All the while, her dog-faced chronicler pines for her love, never receiving more than Conann was willing to give. Conann, an “angel of history,” is ultimately a tragic figure, as seen through the eyes of this heartsick dog man.
Highly experimental and queer coded, Bertrand Mandico’s She is Conann was purportedly inspired by John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, but try as I might, I didn’t seen the connection other than the obvious elements. The movie exists on its own plateau of weirdness and outsider / other identifiers that are incredibly off-putting if you can’t get on its wavelength, which I consistently struggled to do. It’s like a Guy Madden or Michael J. Murphy movie filtered through a gory, phantasmagorical dream state with clear LGBTQ lean-ins (a few males are featured in the peripheral frame, but never given anything to do, which is weird and distracting), and if you’re watching this to get something resembling a plot, an adventure, or any kind of sword and sorcery rewards, then you’ll be sorely disappointed. My favorite moment came when Conann reaches into the mouth of her nemesis and pulls out a bloody, gory sword from her, hilt first. The film very much has a hand made feel to it, glittery, and made-with-passion, but it has no real sense of true cinema to it, and it’ll never approach a mainstream audience because it’s too stubborn and too adamantly an outsider of a film to be a gift to anyone who really loves movies. It’s for a very small audience, but I can’t imagine even that audience would want to watch it a second time.
Altered Innocence released She is Conann onto Blu-ray, and it comes with three short films by filmmaker Bertrand Mandico, which adds up to 83 minutes of material, as well as some trailers.
