"Coma" visualizes the imaginary world of a teenage girl

Motivated by the pandemic isolation, French writer/director Bertrand Bonello’s “Coma” explores the dreams and fears, hopes and anxieties of an unnamed eighteen-year-old. Through live action and animation, the journey chaotically glides through a myriad of current issues, skipping from one to another: the environment, social media influencers, cheating on and breaking up with romantic partners, and psychological entrapment.

Bonello opens and concludes “Coma” with a long, optimistic, philosophical message to his eighteen-year-old daughter Anna, the inspiration for the film and the person to whom it is dedicated. Merging reality and fantasy, subsequent events ponder and navigate issues, sometimes humorously, at other times seriously, always in a stream of consciousness. Abandoning logical progression, the interaction includes dreams anchored in unpredictable detours to Patricia Coma who skips from weather forecasts to advice.

In press notes, Bonello accurately describes his untethered, extravagant exploration as motivated by the pandemic lockdown plus his response to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He notes his combination of diverse textures with live-action, subjective camcorder shots, surveillance footage, archival footage, 2D and 3D animation, plus a nighttime forest with horror overtones. In other words, “Coma” is a rather chaotic assortment of ideas and images, reality and dreams. And yet, it captures our disjointed world and our free flowing stream of consciousness, including pervasive anxieties and elusive freedom from cultural conditioning.

Bonello pursues the slippage between imagination and invention, and it isn’t always easy to hang in there with him. As he says, he deliberately alternates from comedy to irony to more frightening moments. By the end, I appreciated the journey even though I wasn’t always sure where I had been at any moment. In French with English subtitles, “Coma” screens at Webster University’s Winifred Moore auditorium Friday, July 19, through Sunday, July 21, at 7:30 each of those evenings. For more information, you may visit the film series website.