Elina Löwensohn

She is Conann (2024)

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Bertrand Mandico is the greatest filmmaker currently alive & working.  Across three features and dozens of shorts, he’s gradually established a cinematic language all of his own that feels simultaneously ancient & futuristic.  His debut feature The Wild Boys voyages into the past to obliterate gender for a more liberated, libertine future.  His follow-up After Blue sought alien worlds prophesized by the likes of James Bidgood & Kate Bush.  Now, his third feature reshapes the Conan the Barbarian myth into a lesbian fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world.  No one has dared to hijack the movie-making dream machine for their own perverse pleasure in the way Mandico has.  He’s perfectly attuned to the medium’s ability to evoke powerful ideas & feelings out of pure, hand-crafted imagery.  There are allusions to luminary provocateur directors in She is Conann that indicate Mandico thinks of himself as the modern equivalent of a Kenneth Anger or a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he’s actually our modern Méliès: an illusionist who’s pushing the form more than he’s subverting norms.

Specifically, the Anger & Fassbinder allusions are contained in a single leather jacket worn by Mandico’s longtime muse & collaborator Elina Löwensohn.  The jacket is modeled after the title-card fashion centerpiece of Anger’s Scorpio Rising, but instead spells “Rainer” in metal studs.  Löwensohn plays the jacket’s owner, Rainer, as an on-screen avatar for Mandico.  Rainer’s a photographer who orchestrates and documents the brutal violence around him, eventually shouting for his camera’s subjects to be “Sexier! Crazier! More barbaric!” out of frustration that he cannot reach the lofty artistic ideal envisioned in his head.  Löwensohn previously played a very similar role as the pornographer Joy D’Amato (a reference to real-life pornographer Joe D’Amato) in Mandico’s Apocalypse After, but this time she shakes it up by switching genders and hiding under a prosthetic dog mask.  Rainer’s houndish loyalty to the titular, similarly-genderflipped warrior Conann is both as an opportunist and as a hedonist.  Rainer adores Conann’s capability of bone-crunching, head-severing violence more than he adores her personally, and he’s eager to follow at her heels as she swings her sword through the gushing bodies of her enemies across centuries of reincarnation, translating her violence into art.

The role of Conann is filled by a lineage of six actresses, all of whom kill their predecessor to claim her sword & identity.  As a violent brute who lives in the moment, fueled by revenge against the ugly world that shaped her, Conann refuses to accept the normal patterns of aging & death.  Instead of growing and maturing naturally, she instead reaches into the past to assassinate her younger self in a ritualistically violent act of self-reinvention.  Her warpath leads the audience through the violence of Medieval fantasy realms, a 1980s music video interpretation of The Bronx, Europe’s crumbling under Nazi fascism, and a post-human future made almost entirely of glitter.  She’s briefly distracted along the way by love & romance, but her essential barbarism eventually takes over and the body count continues to pile.  Each generation’s bloodlust directly feeds into the next, until Mandico concludes the saga with a punchline about that human impulse transforming into art instead of violence.  He appears to believe that the long history of humanity’s selfishness & viciousness has been concentrated into the work of careerist, self-obsessed artists who do not realize they’re also barbarian brutes.  Or he at least thinks that’s a funny conclusion to make.

I could be totally wrong about Mandico’s thematic intent here.  He is foremost a visual stylist, pushing for imagistic extremes in every frame through outrageous fashion, rear projection, strobe lighting, practical gore, and more glitter than any production has seen since Ridley Scott’s Legend.  His allusions to previous works are all on the surface but oddly refracted through a postmodern lens, from the misspelling of the title to the leather Rainer jacket to the background billboard that simply reads “naked lunch” in lowercase letters for no discernible reason in particular.  Finding coherent meaning in Mandico’s work is a personal journey.  The only guarantee is that he will immerse you in a fanatically vicious world you’ve never seen before; what you make of that world while you visit is entirely up to you.  There just aren’t enough people around me who’ve seen his films to tell me I’m reading too much into his metatextual commentary on art & hedonism.  Maybe one day he’ll become widely beloved enough for me to finally see his work in a proper, packed cinema instead of subjecting a small batch of friends to it on my living room couch.  For now, I’m perfectly happy gazing into his glitter-slathered hellscapes at home, unchallenged about the immense passion & beauty I find in his horny tableaux.

-Brandon Ledet

Amateur (1994)

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“How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?”
“I’m choosy.”

The Criterion Channel has been doing a great job of resurrecting a forgotten generation of once-respected Gen-X indie filmmakers whose work has been weirdly difficult to see in recent years – names like Atom Egoyan, Gregg Araki, and Hal Hartley.  During the glory days of independent film festivals and college radio chic, these low-budget, mid-notoriety auteurs enjoyed a surprising level of cultural mystique that has faded as the distribution of their work has effectively trickled into non-existence.  Maybe that break wasn’t all so bad for their memory & reputation, though.  Revisiting Hal Hartley’s filmography as a Criterion Channel micro-collection in the streaming age feels like taking a time machine back to the Classic Indie Filmmaking days of the 1990s.  In particular, there’s something charmingly quaint about how his low-effort crime picture Amateur functions as a relic of that era.  Every one of his characters loiter around public spaces smoking cigarettes, flipping through porno mags, and making deadpan quips over background tracks by PJ Harvey & Liz Phair.  It’s cute in its own grimy little way, a dusty souvenir of 90s slacker kitsch.

The “amateur” of the title could refer to any one of the main players in Hartley’s off-Broadway, on-camera stage drama.  Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun who’s learning a new trade as a writer of porno-mag erotica.  Elina Löwensohn plays a video store porno actress who’s trying to break away from the industry by making big moves as a self-employed gangster.  Martin Donovan is caught between them as a total amnesiac with a violent past – an amateur at basically everything due to his newfound medical condition.  The unlikely trio eventually find themselves “on the run from bloodthirsty corporate assholes” as they cross paths with the gangsters at the top of the porno industry food chain, a mistake that has them evading handcuffs & bullets.  This premise sounds like it might make for an exciting, sordid action thriller—and maybe it still could—but that kind of entertainment is not on Amateur‘s agenda.  Mostly, Hartley uses the plot as an excuse to have his characters lounge around in hip NYC fashions (styled as a relapsed Catholic pervert, a soft goth, and a business prick, respectfully) while listening to college radio classics by the likes of The Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and My Blood Valentine.

There might be some genuine thematic heft in Amateur that I’m not taking seriously here, something about how New York City is a dangerous playground where desperate transplants reinvent themselves.  That might have resonated with me more if it were NYC community theatre instead of a Hal Hartley film preserved in time.  I mostly found myself distracted by just how Totally ’90s the movie was in its search for contemporary cool cred.  Its gigantic cellphones, breakfast diner ashtrays, and business cards for phone sex lines were all just as specific to its status as an Indie 90s relic as its single-scene cameo from a loud-mouthed Parker Posey.  This is a movie with multiple recurring arguments about why “floppy discs” are neither floppy, nor circular.  Everyone is either absurdly angry or wistfully despondent in a perfectly Gen-X 90s kind of way, and there’s a lot of easy humor pulled from the clash between those two default attitudes.  It’s an easy era to feel nostalgia for as a movie nerd, if not only because people like Hartley, Egoyan, and Araki used to get relatively robust distribution & critical attention, as opposed to the current cinematic landscape where you’re either making over-advertised corporate IP slop or disposable streaming service filler.  We used to be a country, a proper country with a proper indie cinema scene, and the proof is currently streaming on Criterion.

-Brandon Ledet

Apocalypse After: Films by Bertrand Mandico (1998 – 2018)

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Only two feature films into his career, I’m already comfortable thinking of Bertrand Mandico as my favorite working director, even though only his debut was a total stunner.  Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released within my lifetime – a Bidgoodian wet nightmare about gender dysphoria and, ultimately, gender obliteration.  His follow-up, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is more of a flippant prank, using the same sensory intoxication & erotic menace for a much sillier purpose: worshipping the almighty Kate Bush in the rubble of our fallen civilization.  Although it’s seemingly shot in a muted black & white that sidesteps the cosmic blues & purples that make his other features so vivid & vibrant, I’m dying to see his third feature, Conann, which appears to be a gender-subverted riff on the pulp fantasy character Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to take a while for that latest dispatch from Mandico’s id to reach American screens (it just premiered at Cannes this summer), so I decided to placate my curiosity as best as I could by digging into his back catalog of short films.  Altered Innocence has consistently been Mandico’s home distributor since the company’s inception; it’s even arguable that Mandico’s films have been a brand-defining cornerstone for the Vinegar Syndrome partner label, along with the similar dreamlike genre throwbacks of Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalez.  Given that close affiliation, their publishing a collection of Mandico’s short films on a single Blu-ray disc, titled Apocalypse After, was a total no-brainer.  Given my own personal obsession with The Wild Boys, the only surprising thing is that I didn’t jump on this disc the second it was released last year.  I guess I needed to get worked up about a new feature from Mandico dangling just outside my reach to seek out his already-available shorts I hadn’t yet seen.  Well, that and if I immediately jumped on every new Altered Innocence release I wanted to see I’d struggle to pay my energy bill, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them anyway.

The titular short on this disc, “Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe)”, is a calling-card submersion in the subliminal perversions of cinema, consciously transforming “science fiction” into “science titillation” while shouting in frustration that the images still aren’t erotic enough for the director’s liking.  Longtime Mandico collaborator & muse Elina Löwensohn stars as the director’s avatar, an arthouse pornographer named Joy d’Amato (in cheeky reference to real-life pornographer Joe d’Amato).  Mandico’s films are full of sarcastic allusions to real-life artists he admires in this way: Kate Bush, Henry Darger, Jean Cocteau, Walerian Borowczyk, etc.  Curiously, he has yet to name-drop the three filmmakers he most reminds me of—Kenneth Anger, Guy Maddin, and James Bidgood—likely because their influence is already blatantly apparent in the text.  Joy d’Amato is more Bertrand Mandico than she is Joe d’Amato, though, shooting a live-action version of paperback sci-fi cover art with the same vintage porno sensibility you can find in all of Mandico’s recent work.  In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform.  Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art.  No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them.  Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough.  Nothing ever could be.

The “Apocalypse After” short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics – gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc.  The presentation of Mandico’s previous shorts on the Apocalypse After disc is strictly chronological, so you can watch the director arrive at that personal aesthetic over decades of obsessive tinkering.  Over three full hours of his two decades of short-form experiments, Mandico Heads get to watch the filth maestro develop his cosmic visual language in ten preceding works.  In that context, “After Apocalypse” is less of a jumbled collection of Mandico pet obsessions than it is a natural crescendo of a clear pattern in methodology.  His seemingly weird-for-weird’s sake indulgences become more recognizably thoughtful & designed in retrospect, the same way the “Magick Lantern Cycle” packaging of Kenneth Anger’s shorts makes “Lucifer Rising” feel like the most obvious place his art could lead him, not an out-of-nowhere novelty.  The Apocalypse After disc starts with Mandico imitating Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion nightmares in antiqued sepia tone, then seeking the same ancient artifice in short-form magical realist dramas.  He hits a breakthrough mid-career with the mid-length film “Boro in the Box”, which playfully reimagines filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s life in the style of Au Hazard Balthazar (a prototype for the more recent Balthazar riff EO).  By the time Mandico returns to stop-motion in his post-“Boro” short “Living Still Life” (this time animating taxidermized animals), his style is distinctly of his own.  As a result, all of the essential Mandico bangers arrive late on the disc, after he finds his distinct voice as a filmmaker: the Cronenbergian colonoscopy sideshow act “Prehistoric Cabaret,” the fairy tale creature feature “Our Lady of Hormones,” the unlikely Enys Men sister film “Depressive Cop” and, of course, the aforementioned self-portrait in heat “Apocalypse After.”

There are certainly other current filmmakers whose every feature I anticipate with the same gusto as Mandico’s, namely Peter Strickland and Amanda Kramer. None in that unholy trio of perverts gets the critical respect they deserve as playful subverters of the artform.  The academic interest critics used to have in similarly perverse, cerebral genre filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jodorowsky has more recently shifted to formally muted & restrained works of slow cinema auteurs instead.  A lot of the leeway we used to give venerated genre freaks of the past hasn’t trickled down to the unvenerated genre freaks of today, at least not for anyone who hasn’t struck a distribution deal with A24.  Altered Innocence appears to be committed to the cause at least, offering a step-by-step study of Mandico’s work for anyone who cares to learn how he arrived at something as wildly baffling as The Wild Boys.  The only other comparable presentation of a current director’s shorts that I can name is the The Islands of Yann Gonzalez, which I will leave to your imagination what is covered and who handled the distro.

-Brandon Ledet