By Nicole Veneto

Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann left me buzzing, high on a euphoria of aesthetic excess that represents the true legacy of New Queer Cinema.

She Is Conann, written and directed by Bertrand Mandico. Screening at Alamo Drafthouse Boston through February 8.

Doomed lovers Sanja La Rogue (Julia Riedler) and the 35-year-old Conann (Sandra Parfait) in Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann. Photo: Altered Innocence

From its foundations in the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman into the breakthrough coalition of ’90s films by directors like Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki, the cinematic movement known as New Queer Cinema continues to bear fruit in the 21st century. With its origins in the experimental films of Kenneth Anger and James Bidgood, a decent portion of NQC emphasized the inherent artificiality of the medium as an art form, amplifying what was once relegated to the margins of subtext through heightened, theatrical performances or heavily stylized camp impulses manifested in flamboyant costumes and set design. For all its narrative investment in centering queer stories, experiences, and perspectives, this mode of filmmaking has occasionally been criticized as preferring style over substance, as if austere realism is the only way a movie can dramatize queer subjectivity. Like the avant-garde tradition such films pull from, the diverse lineage of NQC displays an incredible amount of craft on shoestring budgets.

Such is the appeal of French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico, whose oeuvre of short films and features abide by the “Incoherence Manifesto”. Written with the collaboration of Icelandic director-producer Katrín Ólafsdóttir, this document outlines a mode of filmmaking that calls for adherence to a practical, DIY approach in the name of aesthetic “incoherence.” It demands the use of found materials for costuming and production design (taste incoherence), rejects “any rule of screenplay” or a fixed narrative tendency (screenplay and cinematographic incoherence), and the elimination of post-production in favor of in-camera effects like overprinting and rear-projection photography (effects and style incoherence). The result is an exquisite corpse in the truest surrealist sense: Mandico ends up weaving together a hodgepodge of oneiric imagery that unites the traditions of underground filmmaking with European art house sensibilities. Put another way, Mandico’s films are like orgiastic art projects where everyone comes away smeared in lipstick and still covered in glitter months after the fact. In the follow-up to 2021’s neo-Western sci-fi acid-trip After Blue (Dirty Paradise) comes Mandico’s She Is Conann (simply Conann in French), his gender-bent spin on Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian pulp stories that’s as unabashedly queer as it is visually decadent.

Doomed to be a queen of hell following a lifetime of barbarism, an elderly Conann (veteran French actress Françoise Brion) recounts the events that have led her to the infernal throne. Guided by the dog-faced demon Rainer (Mandico’s muse Elina Löwensohn in full facial prosthetics), we’re taken on a Divine Comedy-esque journey through Conann’s life from the ages of 15, 25, 35, 45, and 55, where each incarnation is fated to die at the hands of her future self before being reborn anew: an enslaved and vengeful teenager (Claire Duburcq) who bears witness to the murder of her mother; a proud young Amazon (Christa Théret) hellbent on killing barbarian queen Sanja La Rogue (Julia Riedler); an amnesiac stunt woman (played with emotional resonance by Sandra Parfait) living an alternate life in ’80s New York, where she and Sanja are lovers; a middle-aged Nazi commander (Agata Buzek in The Night Porter-inspired get-up); and an elder patron of the arts (Nathalie Richard) willing to bequeath her fortune to any up-and-coming artists who consume her cooked corpse (fellow fans of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, this one’s for you).

Barbarians misbehaving in She Is Conann. Photo: Altered Innocence

Those expecting a straightforward, muscle-bound barbarian film filled with bloody sword fights and epic heroics will come away scratching their heads, although there’s plenty of gore and goopy viscera to satisfy those of the sicko persuasion. (Even the people at Alamo Drafthouse didn’t quite know how to curate their preshow besides playing an assortment of trailers for ’80s barbarian B-movies.) Mandico’s interests lie not in making an artsy send-up of ’80s Canon movies but in creating a dadaesque tapestry that charts its titular character’s life as a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. It’s a sapphic tragedy through the ages where the past must be murdered over and over again to make way for a newer and even more savage future. Mandico plays with the pop culture figure of the barbarian and the notion of barbarianism throughout, envisioned in ways both obvious (Conann’s middle-aged Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS incarnation) and metaphorical (the climactic cannibalistic set piece can be interpreted as pointed criticism of the Silicon Valley barbarians who fund “transgressive” art).

Like Mandico’s 2017 feature debut The Wild Boys, most of Conann is shot in sumptuous 35 mm black-and-white, punctuated by phantasmagoric color cinematography in moments of heightened emotionality or whenever the scene explodes in a glitter bomb of blood and guts. The mise-en-scène is nothing short of ravishing: sets are strewn in lamé fabrics, knobby frosted trees, and there’s an ever-present fog pulled straight out of a John Carpenter movie. Such can be said of the costuming as well, which features everything from body armor shaped like women’s faces, jutting barbs for nipples, and head-to-toe chromium plating that’s almost too shiny to look at. Much of my time with Conann was spent basking in all of the sensual details, sitting in a state of near sensory overload, almost to the point where I didn’t care what was happening on screen. I was so transfixed by what I was looking at that it felt like lucid dreaming. Even if Mandico’s guilty of privileging style over substance, his vision is so singular in the pantheon of contemporary queer cinema it ultimately doesn’t matter whether or not he succeeds in saying anything profound.

Like the wave of filmmakers who burst onto the scene with New Queer Cinema, Mandico’s movies tap into the movement’s underground, avant-garde roots. The director, who identifies as “pansexual, agender and xenogender ‘when I sleep,’” clearly makes films out of a sheer love of the creative craft. His work resists tidy classification, blending genres and imagery together into something as transformative as the characters who populate his worlds. She Is Conann left me buzzing, high on a euphoria of aesthetic excess that represents the true legacy of New Queer Cinema.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.