Recently Viewed: She Is Conann

How to describe She Is Conann? The film resists literalist readings, eschewing traditional narrative in favor of concocting a hallucinatory mélange of allegory, mythology, and Jungian archetype. Attempting to summarize the skeletal “plot” in concrete terms is a fruitless endeavor, akin to gripping sand in your fist; the harder you squeeze, the more grains slip through your fingers—you’ll only ever manage to capture a meager handful.

Sure, you can convincingly argue that the story is “a feminist take on Conan the Barbarian” (Wikipedia certainly does); heck, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you might even be tempted to dissect its structural similarities to Cloud Atlas (though whereas that time-bending sci-fi spectacle featured actors playing multiple characters across the ages, this gritty anti-genre oddity adopts the opposite approach, with various facets of the protagonist’s persona portrayed by a succession of different performers)—but what do such superficial observations actually reveal about its tone, style, and atmosphere? Analyzing the movie’s thematic subtext (the conflict revolves around the heroine repeatedly “killing” her past identities in pursuit of a nebulous future, utilizing the concept of the “shadow self” as a manifestation of her increasingly fractured psyche) is likewise an exercise in futility; perusing my interpretation of the material is no substitute for experiencing Bertrand Mandico’s delightfully deranged creative vision firsthand.

Ultimately, She Is Conann is a defiantly unclassifiable object, straddling the razor-thin line between avant-garde art and sleazy exploitation cinema; it is, in other words, aggressively French. I won’t pretend to understand its appeal (indeed, I’ve yet to fully digest the subtleties beneath its surface-level maximalism); nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed briefly surfing the euphoric crests and baffling troughs of its unapologetically offbeat wavelength.