The dead are not dying. In the Paris elite lyceum for girls appears black Haitian Melissa. Her relatives are associated with the cult of voodoo, and she is, in general, a little out of this world. Despite this, Fanny, the main character, quickly finds a common language with the new girl, not assuming what awaits her ahead, because, do not forget that voodoo, who-do-what-you-don't-dare-do people.
Bertrand Bonello is a trickster who does not fit well into the fictional and critically cherished typologies and Procrustean bed of film streams. Determining the genre affiliation of his films is an ungrateful occupation. With apparent external simplicity, they exist according to their whimsical internal laws, their beauty is elusive and impermanent.
Baby Zombie, the 51-year-old Frenchman’s new work, is no exception. With a lot of convention, it can be attributed to the drama of growing up, arranged by mystical and (neo)colonial connotations.
The two main characters are children of different civilizations despite the fact that they live and study together. Fanny, the product of European values - freedom, equality, fraternity, liberalism and a set of other beautiful words, long lost meaning and voiced by the teacher at the lecture. When asked to say something personal, Melissa quotes Depestra’s Captain Zombie: “White World, listen to my zombie voice glorify our dead.” Bonello, who loves cinema in a social way, combines these two worlds in order to rethink the methanoia accepted by European intellectuals as the norm (see, for example, “No, or the vain glory of command” by di Oliveira) about the colonial past (Haiti, where Melissa came from, gained independence from France in 1804): in a new historical turn, these civilizational models in the face of our heroines mutually attract and penetrate each other.
Melissa tries to adapt to a new world of white girls from aristocratic families. In turn, Fanny and her classmates are attracted by the unknown and eerie power of ancient rituals and beliefs that their new girlfriend personifies. It is not yet known who will need whom most and who will depend on whom.
The Frenchman captures the multicultural appearance of contemporary French society, which in a concentrated form appears in the textbook scene of the collective musical trance for the director (remember “Nocturam”): irregular girl voices read “N” amicably. J Respect R" follows the Congolese rapper Damso, although they seem to be more befitting to learn in the Lyceum Christmas ballad Silent Night, Holly Night.
Bonello wouldn’t be himself if he was only telling the story of growing up or reflecting on his country’s historical roots. He feels most comfortable where different hypostases of the same story intersect, refract and mutually transform. "Baby Zombie" film at the intersection of social cinema and dream trance, metaphysics of death and materialism of being, skillfully woven magical realism and girl's dreams, so typical of coming of age themes. In the new film, the director quite useful experience in analyzing the themes of the youth subculture (“Nocturama”) and the closed female society (“House of Tolerance”), he subtly feels the substance under study and quite accurately places accents.
The tape is full of signature bonelloisms. Telling, in fact, two interrelated stories, the director refuses to successfully tested him two-act structure of some previous films (for example, in “Tiresia”, or already mentioned “Nocturam”, he swiped the development of the plot in a radically different direction about the middle of timekeeping), but masterfully uses his other “lethal weapon” – editing, which has long become his hallmark. Using parallel and remote editing sequences, he equally successfully confronts time-distant events in unexpected plastic combinations (Clervius Narcissus, the main character of the first storyline, sometimes seems to just wander into the territory of modernity) and, on the contrary, opens up in the timing of the film simultaneously occurring things and circumstances (conversation Melissa with her aunt on the phone). Other obsessions are bold musical accompaniment, replays (“Repetition is a form of change,” director Brian Eno quotes), visual emphases, scripted twists (“I always try to come up with something to surprise the audience”), Rapid, polyscreen – also available.
As a result, "Baby Zombie" - flesh of flesh classic Bonello, lurking not always understandable geometry, full of images that give rise to rest in the viewer, intertextual, unhurried, illusory, non-trivially melting reality and fiction, eluding a single interpretation (for example, whether the events reflected on the screen, are just a figment of the imagination of the main character experiencing puberty and personal drama). The Frenchman again avoids the head-on message and invites the viewer to find his own message: excessive evidence harms the truth.