Bertrand Madico flips the ultra-masculine Conan The Barbarian stories on their heads with a mind-blowing, time-and-space bending tale of a Barbarian queen who traverses multiple lives and deaths. A Barbarian story through a Barbie lens.
She is Conann begins with the first incarnation of the character being taken captive by warrior queen Sanja after her mother is brutally murdered. Forced into a life of slavery, Conann is visited upon by Rainier (Elina Löwensohn), a dog-headed artist and guide who leads Conann through the afterlife, documenting her campaign of brutal revenge and carnage.
Mandico uses of a sextet of actors, all women, to play Conann throughout her reincarnations and at various stages of her life. It’s a technique perhaps most popularly used by Todd Haynes in his treatment of Bob Dylan, 2007’s I’m Not There. It’s a difficult and counterintuitive way of telling the story, but Mandico handles it deftly and really shows how Conann evolves and reflects on her actions using different actors to explicate changes in the character’s outlook and experiences. The acting is very much up to snuff, and each of the six women who portray the various phases of Conann’s life knocks it out of the park. There are many, many gimmicks here like Mandico’s use of colour as punctuation, making obvious when Conann is in distress or is experiencing some extreme emotion. But they enhance the story and the vibes of She is Conann and are not there to obscure or course-correct from flimsy performances, which is an improvement over the other Mandicos I’ve seen.
You might be surprised that the movie I’ve been describing so far isn’t as chaotic as it sounds when it comes to following the story. It’s still chaotic, just because you’re often watching characters swathed in tinfoil talking to a bipedal dog like they’re Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, but things largely move in a lineal fashion. For Conann, it’s basically a live, die, repeat situation. The movement from a cis-presenting white teenager in the earliest segment to androgyny in the middle act to a militant Black lesbian in the most key setting, an urban metropolis shows an evolution of the Conann character through an intersectional lens.
And the violence, the glorious violence. The original Conan films were never short on it, but She Is Conann takes things to another level. Heads roll, body parts are impaled or severed, and absolute litres of blood are spilled throughout. Best I can tell, most if not all of the effects here are of the practical sort, and that’s impressive for a film with such meticulous production design. There’s a level of craft, care, and detail in every setup in She Is Conann, from barbarian camps to the literal domain of Hell, all feeling like a twisted stage play.
Immediate comparisons to I’m Not There and the many incarnations of Bob Dylan aside, there’s no more clear comparison for She Is Conann than Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker in the sense that Conann is clearly born out of love for the original popular franchise on which it’s based. But there’s also a visible and clear frustration with the limitations (and certainly the inherent masculine chauvinism) also inherent in both the Batman and Conan mythos, making both Drew’s and Manico’s queering (in a few senses) of the original stories feel satisfying and necessary.
Adding to the ever-growing pantheon of maximalist filmmaking, She is Conann leaves nothing on the table. When there’s this much blood and gore and glitter on display, it would be easy to say that the project leans on simply gender-swapping the protagonist and simply throwing as much excess as possible at the wall. But there’s an uncommon intentionality to Mandico’s lens which comes through in the strength of all its characters, even those we’re meant to hate. While there’s no stronger through-line in She Is Conann than the violence that goes hand-in-hand with love there is more, as well, about the barbarism of extreme wealth and privilege, and the power of the underclass. It’s beautiful, unexpected, and perhaps the most interesting addition to the Conan canon in decades.
Bertrand Mandico’s She is Conann is currently in limited theatres from Altered Innocence. Check out the Altered Innocence site to find screenings near you and to preorder the Blu-Ray and DVD versions.
