She Is Conann Review: A Gleefully Hostile Riff on the Conan the Barbarian Mythos

Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, French writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem. Throughout, the oneiric imagery seeping from every frame takes precedence over narrative linearity. And yet, even as the film embodies the self-indulgent ideal of art for art’s sake, it devours itself from within and drops the viewer back into the arena of politics.

Lest we forget even for moment that we’re watching a film, She Is Conann is shot in black and white, aside from the sporadic flash of violence and one framing sequence set in hell’s antechamber, where a dead Conann (Françoise Brion) takes stock of her life of barbarism. For her guide, there’s the dog-headed punk clairvoyant Rainer (Elina Löwensohn), whose name could be an allusion to Rainer Maria Rilke or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Their dialogue at any given moment suggests a product of the exquisite corpse process invented by the surrealists.

Conann’s memories, which make up the bulk of Mancido’s film, see a series of Conanns—each 10 years older than the last and armed with an ever more refined sense of barbarity—murder and replace their younger selves. Conann is played by a succession of actors (Claire Duburcq, Christa Théret, Sandra Parfait, Agata Buzek, Nathalie Richard, and Françoise Brion), such that her age, face, and, in one section, her race, changes throughout the film.

Rainer, meanwhile, remains unchanged. She documents Conann’s acts of barbarity with a flashbulb camera, and to some extent dictates them by reference to some vague “prophesy.” Played by a woman but referred to as male throughout, Rainer exemplifies what for Mandico has become a calling card: casting women in most roles irrespective of their characters’ genders. Arguably, this depoliticizes gender as well as race on the level of film’s plot, where such categories appear irrelevant, while amplifying them on the level of production. It contributes in any case to the film’s paradoxical melding of hermeticism and politics.

At each stage of life, Conann inhabits a different “historical” era—albeit filtered through Mandico’s fertile imagination. Only the first chunk of the film takes place somewhere recognizable as the world from Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian series. From there, Conann’s reincarnations take her to such far-flung scapes as a queercore Bronx and a dystopian future that combines imperial Roman and Nazi iconography.

Conann isn’t so much a coherent self as a transhistorical embodiment of “barbarism,” the connotations of which shift over the course the film. Barbarism may be, among other things, the symbolic murder of one’s own youth through adaptation to reality, or of the past by the future in the name of history. Although unswervingly transgressive, it seems to shift as Conann ages from a desire for vengeance to a stance of dissent, before finally taking on more autocratic overtones.

So much of the film’s impact hinges on the ending that it would be absurd not to mention it. A postmenopausal Conann gathers together the greatest artists of the age and invites them to consume a gourmet preparation of her corpse in exchange for her accumulated plunder, expecting them to grant her immortality through their work. Like a scene out of La Grande Bouffe, the spectacle of artists guzzling away their integrity to embrace their role as propogandists is a nauseating indictment of art and, by extension, Mandico’s film. In her trajectory from powerlessness to total self-possession and transcendence of law, Conann’s life parallels the liberation of art from all strictures as called for by modernism, but that triumph, Mandico warns, may circle back around to aesthetic authoritarianism.

Rainer’s prophesy, in other words, might be self-fulfilling, amounting to little more than the publication Conan International, the glossy magazine we catch a glimpse of early in the film in Conann’s afterlife, which presumably features a selection of Rainer’s photographs. Dramatizing the self-cannibalism of “art for art’s sake,” She Is Conann effectively cancels itself out, but for as tedious and incoherent as it can be at times, the film isn’t without a goofy sense of humor.