‘She Is Conann’ Director Bertrand Mandico and Star Elina Löwensohn On Crafting Their Strange, Glittery World
Bertrand Mandico is a modern master of queer cinema, creating strange and transgressive works such as The Wild Boys and After Blue. Now, filling out this trilogy is his new film She Is Conann, a glitter-filled sci-fi epic full of blood, love, and barbarism.
Read the full synopsis below:
Six lives, six eras, and six deaths mark Conann’s poetic journey through different incarnations and lesbian loves. Guiding Conann through her many epic lives is Rainer, a Cerberus of many otherworldly dimensions whose paparazzi camera sees all. The perversity of The Wild Boys and the hero’s journey of After Blue (Dirty Paradise) come together in this even greater handmade homage as Mandico ropes in influences as lush as Fellini Satyricon, The Night Porter, The Hunger, and Fassbinder’s entire oeuvre to craft a moving portrait of a warrior trying to find her place while outside of space, time, and meaning.
Dread Central spoke with Mandico and star Elina Löwensohn about being cinephiles, becoming a dog, and the beauty of Kenneth Anger.
Dread Central: Bertrand, why Conan as your source of inspiration for this?
Bertrand Mandico: I wanted to make a film about barbarism. So I was thinking about what to do and I wanted to do it from the perspective of a woman over time and across a variety of epics. When you mention barbarism and barbarians, the first thing you think of is Conan, and so I started to think of that and revisit it.
When I started to do my research, I wanted to go back to the source. So I looked at what had inspired Robert E. Howard when he had written the novels of Conan the Barbarian. I found that that inspiration had been a figure from Celtic mythology Conan, but spelled with two Ns. And, this mythical creature person was surrounded by cerebus, or demons that had the heads of dogs.
DC: Oh, cool. So then Elina, I want to hear about your experience in this film, especially with the prosthetics. How long did it take to put that whole prosthetic on?
Elina Löwensohn: Basically it was about maybe 40 to 45 minutes. First of all, it was the shape of my face. So in this way, it was fitted right on the size of my features. They would stick it with a sort of type of glue and it would take about 40 to 45 minutes. Then they would maybe put some makeup around the eyes in the places where the thing was not stuck to save money because we didn’t have so much money. I used a mask for two days, but we couldn’t do more because it got too tough and hard and then it started to unstick.
For me, it was the first time I was doing work with a mask. So indeed it frees up the body and it definitely frees up the face of an actress who’s getting older. So if I wake up in the morning, I’m not looking in the mirror thinking, “Oh my God, the bags under my eyes, oh my God, this and that.”
I’m free so I can be tired, I can drink. It was like this was a freedom of I don’t even think about my face. Obviously, that’s the good part. The difficult part is that I have this thing, the skin doesn’t breathe normally for the ten hours I’m in it. People don’t know my real face. Some people didn’t even say hello to me on the set because maybe they consider me the dog.
But in any case, to me, it’s a freedom. Then you develop the body it gives you. Yes, at times I felt like,” But there are so many more expressions under my mask that he won’t capture!” So sometimes I could feel a frustration because I knew that the mask, it was only so much, but it was well enough made.
Also, I have my eyes, so I thought, “This is the rule of the game.” But at times I could feel some frustration that there’s so much more underneath that you’ll never see. But it’s okay. Basically what I’m grateful for is to have such an opportunity to play such characters. But with Bertrand in our work for many years now, I’m lucky that he gives me different colors to play with. That I’m very grateful for.
DC: It must have been such a fun character to play. It’s like you’re playing a little bit, you get to go to so many different emotions, and you really are this kind of impish, playful character.
EL: Exactly. There’s a side of Rainer that is malicious. But at the same time, we find out that he has a heart and he probably is less barbaric than Conann herself, which I like. So it’s not just black and white in the written part of this character. In that way, you are right. It gives me more things to play around with and invent. It’s not just one thing.
DC: Bertrand, how did you decide the aesthetics and the costuming for Rainier and how it’s unchanging the whole film versus Conann who’s always changing?
BM: I think what I wanted to do is make a really anachronistic character. When we see him in ancient times, he is totally anachronistic by the way he’s dressed, by the way he is, people think he’s almost a sort of magician because of the way he appears. And so to the barbarians, he’s this magical creature. But then when we transfer him to the 1990s in the Bronx, he fits right in. Yet he’s also a bit anachronistic because he has a strange look about him. And what I wanted to do was to play with this idea of anachronism and magical appearance. For example, when the car magically appears in ancient times, it’s a car, it could be a dragon. And if you are in contemporary times and the car appears, it’s just an old car.
The other thing I wanted to do with the character of Rainer is really to give him a look. And the look is the look of Rainer Fassbinder because Fassbinder is somebody that I’ve admired. He’s not a demon, but I wanted the character to have that kind of look with the leather and that very sort of heavy presence.
The other thing that the character does is the character has the camera and is constantly taking the pictures. He provokes incidents, but he also witnesses them. This is part of the barbarity that he’s creating. He does this throughout the film, and he’s constantly using the camera. Yet at the end when we come to the 50-year-old Conann, who is deciding which artists are going to be the heirs to everything that she has, Rainer is looking for recognition as the artist who’s taken all of these photos. And in the end, he’s not given this recognition. So what was important to me too was to show this idea, not just of the tribute to Fassbinder, but also the idea of recognition or non-recognition of the artist.
DC: I love that. This is such a movie about homage. So why so much homage? What is the importance of homage to you as an artist and in telling these stories, but also incorporating elements of other artists, of other works?
BM: I am a real cinephile, and I think that this is how I made myself, how I constructed myself around the idea of being a cinephile. And I’m really the sum of all of the films that I’ve seen, and I think it’s the least that I could do is to render tribute to all of these people who did have an influence. In a way, cinema is my religion, and each time I am doing one of these tributes or homage to one of these directors, it’s almost like a candle that’s being lit in their honor.
DC: I love that so much. That’s my new creed for me watching movies. Well, I did want to ask, was Kenneth Anger an influence for you at all in this between the jacket and the car and the queerness of it?
BM: Yes, absolutely. Of course, he’s a filmmaker that I like a great deal, and I think one of the reasons why is because Kenneth Anger is somebody who ritualized the act of making films. And it was almost as though it was a magic that he was creating, that he was participating in. He really goes back to the earliest days of Hollywood and filmmaking in Hollywood, and it’s the pagan period of Hollywood filmmaking. There’s always this idea of his relationship to the start of cinema when it still did have this magic component to it.
That was an important aspect of using my influence from him. Even though I like to retain the formal aspects that were part of these experimental filmmakers, what’s important for me is the story, telling the story, the narration, and making the stories accessible to the viewers.
Another person who was an important influence was Jean Cocteau. I think that Couto was not only a poet, but a filmmaker as well. And he had the same desire to make a narrative accessible to the viewer. Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast is a very good example of that.
DC: Bertrand, what’s next for you?
BM: Well, my next project most media project is I’m doing a film version of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka, and it’s something that is going to be shown as a live performance. After that, I’m thinking of my next film projects. I realized after that the series that I did of The Wild Boys, After Blue, and She Is Conann form a trilogy. Now I’m ready to move on to do something completely different. So I’m thinking about it and I’m going to surprise myself with that.
Categorized:Interviews
