She Is Conann overview: a fever dream about discovering magnificence in barbarism

Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian is so deeply rooted within the golden age of cartoonishly hypermasculine pulp fantasy that it’s onerous to think about a daring, feminist tackle the character. However Altered Innocence’s new movie She Is Conann, from French author / director Bertrand Mandico, takes the basic Conan fable to new heights with its mind-bending visuals and story of how humanity’s capability for violence transcends gender.

Set in a shapeshifting world the place time and area morph in a chaotic, dream-like approach, She Is Conann tells the story of how an unassuming younger woman goes on to grow to be a legendary barbarian after her village is ransacked by a band of bloodthirsty marauders. At 15 years outdated, Conann’s (Claire Duburcq) destiny appears all however sealed after her mom is murdered and she or he’s enslaved by Sanja (Julia Riedler) — a vicious warrior who stalks the land looking for weak targets to hunt for sport. However with nothing however her personal life left to lose, Conann chooses to embrace the foreign money of her world — grotesque barbarism — with a purpose to save herself. In making that call, she inadvertently units into movement occasions that go on to form the course of human historical past.

In She Is Conann’s most simple plot beats and its depiction of a nightmarish world the place sexualized ultraviolence is the norm, you may see flashes of John Milius’ testosterone-soaked 1982 Conan the Barbarian film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. However slightly than merely making an attempt to subvert Howard’s hypermasculine creation with a narrative centering girls characters, She Is Conann faucets into one of the crucial fascinating features of the unique Conan mythos to gorgeous impact.

Earlier than Conan was a totally realized particular person, the barbarian was merely the previous lifetime of one other character featured in “Folks of the Darkish” — Howard’s 1932 quick story initially printed in Unusual Tales of Thriller and Terror a couple of man discovering the existence of his earlier incarnations. She Is Conann takes the concept to the following stage by introducing Conann not simply as an peculiar singular woman but in addition as an older girl (Françoise Brion) taking inventory of the numerous lives she led on her technique to turning into an icon of conflict and destruction. 

Fifteen-year-old Conann is only one piece of the puzzle, and her terror speaks to how she’s on the very starting of her epic. However that concern offers technique to one thing extra advanced and harmful as Conann meets the demon Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) and her personal 25-year-old self (Christa Théret), who should actually homicide her previous counterpart with a purpose to transfer ahead into their shared future. 

As an alternative of chronicling Conann’s life in a historically linear style, She Is Conann zeroes in on these pivot moments of self-annihilation / realization as a approach of exploring the numerous completely different kinds that barbarity can take. That is all long-forgotten historical past to the elder Conann — an ethereal girl wandering the depths of hell looking for her recollections. But it surely’s all new and terrifying to the movie’s youthful Conanns, who enter the movie as representations of particular many years through which the titular barbarian really established herself as a pressure to be reckoned with.

By Anna Le Mouël’s manufacturing design, you may see how She Is Conann got here into form as a movie after Mandico frolicked cultivating concepts for different Conan-focused initiatives on the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. Particularly in its opening act, because the elder Conann’s first discovering herself within the underworld, the movie seems like an summary stage play meant to evoke the sense of shock that may include wanting again on the arc of 1’s life. The movie’s play-like high quality makes its brutal, lovely transitions from one Conann to the following straightforward sufficient to grasp as a metaphor for the barbarity of destroying one model of your self to grow to be one other.

However whereas She Is Conann presents the many years of Conann’s life as vignettes, they’re every so richly textured that it’s onerous to think about any of them being as highly effective with out cinematographer Nicolas Eveilleau’s potential to focus on their intricate particulars. Regardless of its gory portrayals of disembowelment, She Is Conann is commonly a surprisingly lovely movie outlined by an exquisitely high-fashion aesthetic that costume designer Elise Cribier-Delande brilliantly makes use of to discover the numerous sides of Conann’s id.

No two Conanns are precisely alike, however they’re all girls whose needs — for vengeance, for understanding, for different individuals — in the end drive them to be the very best at what barbarians do. As She Is Conann hurtles towards its conclusion, Conann herself turns into an more and more fascinating and macabre determine, however it’s the movie’s concepts about what barbarism appears to be like like which might be most impressed. Although it could be onerous to think about depictions of homicide, cannibalism, and conflict as poetic issues of arresting magnificence, that’s the mode She Is Conann exists in, and it’s a sight to behold.

She Is Conann additionally stars Sandra Parfait, Christophe Bier, Karoline Rose Solar, Holly-Rose Clegg, Yuming Hey, and Anna Raisson. The movie is at present scheduled for a restricted variety of theatrical screenings in numerous cities throughout the US, however the movie can be out there to preorder on DVD and Blu-Ray.