Female Conan the Barbarian: We’ve seen one of Cannes 2023’s weirdest films

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As he journeys through the Abyss, the hellhound Rainer recounts Conan’s six lives, forever killing his future, across ages, myths, and centuries. From childhood, a slave to Sanja and his barbarian horde, to the heights of cruelty at the gates of our world.

“Conan” is presented at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes of the 76th Cannes Film Festival.

gender fluidity (ES)

The fact that Bertrand Mandico’s films are distributed by UFO Distribution is both amusing and logical. Because the director is a real alien in the French cinematic landscape. Even if we start to identify more and more with him, his and his taste genres (cinematic and sexual), which he likes to combine in order to overcome them better.

After a few short films, her transition to feature film was made with Les Garçons Sauvage, a black-and-white allegory of transcendence as sublime and contrasting as Conan, a striking and feminine reinterpretation of Robert E.’s fantasy novels. The adaptations of which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star in the early 80s.

There are no prominent muscles here, but a woman, a barbarian, played by six different actors (including Krista Terrett). One heroine for every age, whose hellhound Rainer (director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s canine reincarnation) tells us about life and death, each iteration of the character killed by the next, in a tale brimming with fatality.

Because love and death go hand in hand in the unclassifiable cinema of Bertrand Mandico. And if the nudity is less present here than in the past, Conan is no less surprising, fascinating, disturbing, amusing, exciting… sometimes in the same impulse that it invokes the spirits of David Cronenberg and Portier de Night as well as the fate of a character named Europe in his It connects the film with the present.

The political aspect of Bertrand Mandico’s cinema is certainly not new, and the fact that actors portray male characters (and vice versa) was one of the clearest proofs of this. But none of his films have resonated with our times as much as Conan. Perhaps because the project was first conceived near the Amandier Theater (and filmed in the studio next door), during Covid, and perhaps it is from this culturally uncertain situation that the pessimism of the feature film was born.

To me, the height of barbarism is the killing of youth

Freed from some of the over-emphasized metaphors from his previous work, perhaps more accessible (and digestible), Conan is still a no-holds-barred work. Iconoclast. strange Where color comes to black and white like a flash, with every flash of violence.

A story that calculates the artificiality of its scenery and declares its love for genres that are often taken from the top and confined to the B and Z series, without playing noses. And where the fluids, the recurring motifs in his filmography, mix as well as the registers.

A cinema that leaves no one indifferent and can cause real denial because it refuses to remain in parentheses. But this is precisely what fascinates his audience, immersed in the demented visions offered by the filmmaker, who can make their eyes sparkle like the glitter that often appears on the screen.

This time the background is even more relevant, and the fact that the centuries have passed with the hero allows him to finally speak to us and mock the current artistic productions (and influencers) with an uncomfortable finale.

“To me the height of barbarism is to kill the youth”Bertrand Mandico told him three colors in December 2020 to show Conann during its pre-production. Did he know at the time that this concern in the form of a heartfelt cry would fit so well in the context in which his film would be shown for the first time? And what additional power would that give to this unclassifiable work, certain images of which haunt us after the show?

Now we just have to wait for the theatrical release date. Or take advantage of the Quinzaine des Cinéastes film screenings, which will still be held in June in Paris.