Bedroom pop? Or bedroom shoegaze? More like bedroom darkwave. Dedicated in an opening narration to his 18 year old daughter, French director Bertrand Bonello made Coma (2022) during Covid lockdown and frames the teenage bedroom as its setting. Even with the alarms outside reiterating lockdown curfew, the sight of a teenager stuck in their bedroom, even a spacious one, connects beyond the pandemic. To memories of being bored and restless in adolescence, and confined to the one space you could call your own. Louise Labèque is the young girl who the film focuses upon, and continually gives off a quiet aura of sadness. Julia Faure plays an influencer named Patricia Coma who the girl follows, watching Coma’s videos discussing free will and determinism, striking a glamorous pose of philosophical provocation, at the same time selling a memory game to her subscribers, a device that destabilises their sense of choice. We seem to explore the young girl’s inner state through dreams and fantasies, mediated by technology and different film styles.
Using a low budget and limited actors, Bonnello and his crew expand the focus beyond the physical realm towards the digital through zoom chats with friends, to the dreamscape of imagining a soap opera drama playing out with barbie dolls and a liminal twilight zone within the darkening woods. Interweaving different threads together, I found Coma to be inventive and compelling, moving well past some of the more egregious examples of lockdown cinema (Locked Down is so far the worst). The aura of dread and anxiety, the teenager’s fascination with death in the form of a serial killer obsession, and the sense of creativity and construction works like a Godardian essay film at times. Clocking in under 90 minutes, Coma feels like a shorter serve of the uneasiness within Bonello’s next film, the sci-fi epic, The Beast, narrowed down to a small scale setting, and swimming around in one teenager’s dreamscape. Available to stream on Mubi. Recommended.
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