2019 Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Haiti, 1962: A man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. In Paris, 55 years later, at the prestigious Légion d’honneur boarding school, a Haitian girl confesses an old family secret to a group of new friends - never imagining that this strange tale will convince a heartbroken classmate to do the unthinkable.
There are any number of horror films about “voodoo” magic and its colonialist underpinnings — Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 “I Walked with a Zombie” remaining the most formative example — but only Bertrand Bonello’s take on the subject includes an oral presentation on the life and times of Rihanna. It would be foolish to expect anything else from the firebrand director behind “House of Pleasures” and “Nocturama,” whose films see history as less of a forward march than an uneasy churn; his work obfuscates clearly delineated temporalities in order to emphasize that while everyone may live in the present the past is never really dead.
As its title suggests, “Zombi Child” finds Bonello taking that idea to its logical and most…
Hoop-tober (hopefully), #25:
This is so tremendously similar to a short piece that I wrote while locked in a residential treatment facility, during my senior year of high school (the narrative was legitimately a multigenerational story about Clairvius Narcisse himself, and one of his relatives!) but, alas, that is a lost chronicle -- as is my contemporary Little Red Riding Hood redux -- a sad actuality that I've been trying to come to terms with for years, swept away in the clouds of non-replication and discarded student desktops. Oh well, I could never tell a story as well as maestro Bonello anyway.
A mixed bag. Bonello can certainly come up with a scene and one can admire his go for broke mentaily. His handling of young cast and shifting power balances is fine as well, yet while one can praise Bonello for not setting for facile white European humanism, this remains a movie about the heritage of European colonialism that can't avoid failing pray to it. Knowing where the booby traps are doesn't mean you are avoiding them.
The outlandish visuals from director Bertrand Bonello in this compelling and interesting movie transitions between the grotesque and the cerebral, and stabilise's on a territory on the edge of horror. It settles on two interlinked timelines and questions how the cultural and political legacy of one country shades and acquaints another. The film appears to divide itself into two equal parts with two fundamentally different storylines before combining to form a single narrative in the fulfilling final act.
The lighting and sound design are atmospheric, and the school itself creates a sufficient amount of surrealism to deliver the bizarre metaphysical aspects in play. At the same time, emblems and moods crisscross with topics of politics and culture. The self-supplied musical score from Bonello helps to accentuate a movie which apprehends the irrepressibility of teenage disaffection, and overall it's victorious enough in establishing a distinctive and affecting ambience while generously developing its unusual relationship to space and time.
After the godardian doomed revolutionaries of Nocturama, Bonello asks for a reconsideration of the very concept of revolution - in a classroom of all places. This takes me back to what Régis Debray said in his book about May '68: the counterrevolution was so successful that it's nearly impossible to have a revolution in Europe now, but the African revolutionary movements are well and alive. Perhaps one of the biggest changes in European politics that Marx didn't anticipate was the turn towards social-democracies. Of course, this kind of regime can only successfully exist in a post-industrial society, i.e. in a society that has withdrawn from the industrial competion for the lowest cost of production. This current state of affairs where…
At one point the girls in this movie are listening to a French rapper and he says something like: “I will always piss on the Champs-Élysées“ and I just could not contain my laughter.
I appreciated the anticolonialist message, but it felt a bit muddied by the white girl trying to use voodoo on her ex-boyfriend… like, what? Maybe it is seeking to acquaint cultural appropriation with colonialism? I don’t know—this was all over the place really. It does have its moments, but was stylistically and narratively confused for the most part. I wish they would have focused a bit more on the aspect of the plot that takes place in Haïti and less on the French boarding school. Some of these modern ultraslowburn horrors work for me, some don’t, and more often than not, Zombi Child didn’t.
The problem with Zombi Child is less that it's 'slow and boring', as the meticulous filmmaking is its strength. The problem is the editing undermines its own strength by switching time periods the moments the power of the film takes over you.
The present day story is more engrossing, by design as we have more human characters to relate to. I feel the 1962 footage could have been relegated to flashbacks and briefer glimpses. The colonialism story in here, which is heavy at times, would have hit just as well
"Don't take notes, just try to think," says the prof at the very exclusive girls' school built on "national values" - but perhaps it should be 'feel', judging by the one girl whose mind is on a boy ("I miss your kisses") in the midst of all the academic chatter. Horror too is treated academically, with playful ambivalence, the (white) girls tinged with horror iconography - a slo-mo sequence in the communal bathroom echoes Carrie, green goo coming out of one girl's mouth (for a joke) brings up The Exorcist - then suddenly it's not, Bonello doing his own Personal Shopper with a startling irrational streak. Is it because the girl uses voodoo to try and fix her own First…
