If in his previous film, Nocturama (2016), Bertrand Bonello offered a disturbing panorama of the labyrinth of contradictions in which a group of young urban terrorists move, in Zombi Child the reflection seems destined to enter a well no less complex, the French colonial past. Through the myth of the zombie, the director of Casa de Tolerance structures his new film in two parts to move in a zigzag between memory and the present and thus reconstruct a reality of amorphous morality from the very roots.
On the one hand, there is the elitist boarding school where a new student arrives who is received with suspicion by her classmates, a Haitian who has lost her parents in the earthquake that hit the country in 2010 and who only seems welcomed by a classmate obsessed with a summer love. On the other hand, the film collects a real event that occurred more than half a century ago, in 1962: the case of Clairvius Narcisse, a survivor of a voodoo zombification.
The final voodoo rite aims to unite the two shores, that of the past and the present, that of the colony and the Empire, that of experience and history.
A creepy story that was collected by Canadian Wade Davis in a book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, which Wes Craven adapted in the late eighties into a movie of the same title. Victim of a voodoo rite, Clairvius Narcisse was poisoned, left for dead and buried alive to finally get him out of the ground and revive him with an antidote and, thanks to more drugs, erase his consciousness and memory to turn him into a docile slave destined to work for for life in the cotton plantations of the former colony. A hell from which he miraculously managed to wake up and escape.
Faced with the suggestive Haitian story - shot almost without dialogue, sensory and mysterious, with bodies rooted in films like The Crazy Masters, by Jean Rouch, or I walked with a zombie, by Jacques Tourneur - the current French woman seems not to find her ultimate sense. It starts off high, with a long shot-reverse shot of a class given by historian Patrick Boucheron on the French Revolution and the concept of experience. The mixture of laconic undead and talkative teenage hormones allows Bonello to draw a map where ethnographic gaze and historical guilt converge in a provocative attempt to revise history. All to end in a final voodoo rite that, with all the visual fascination that Maya Deren captured in her day, intends to unite the two shores, that of the past and the present, that of the colony and the Empire, that of experience and history. Ambition that is lost in the waters of a present that is too banal for zombies of flesh and blood.
Zombie Child
Direction: Bertrand Bonello Cast: Wislanda Louimat, Louise Labeque, Adile David, Ninon Francois, Mathilde Riu, Bijou Mackenson, Katiana Milfort, Sayyid El Alami Genre: Drama. France, 2019 Duration: 103 minutes.
