In ZombiChild, the audacity of Bertrand Bonello's filmmaking is enough to inspire madness
What does and doesn’t constitute cultural appropriation? Tracking down your classmate’s mambo aunt and begging her, in between offering her wads of money, to cast a voodoo spell on your pretty boy ex? French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s latest picture,, is half historical account, half racial reckoning—entirely ambitious, and equally as ambiguous.
Bonello is white, just like Fanny , his bratty, lovesick protagonist, a student at the Légion d’honneur boarding school, which Napoleon established for the purposes of educating the daughters of men awarded the, well, the Légion d’honneur, and where entry remains a hereditary right. To her, voodoo is a means to an end, that end being that Pablo , her beau, has his soul bound to hers.
That’s a hell of a heritage, enough to give Mélissa occasional vivid nightmares and make her feel ever as the outsider. Bonello allowsto gradually swell as he cuts back and forth from Narcisse’s ordeal to Fanny’s “ordeal”: The film opens up like a grim umbrella of dread over time, Bonello’s deliberate pacing affording Narcisse, Fanny, Mélissa and eventually Katy time to breathe in each scene.
Bonello doesn’t abandon Fanny to his audience’s contempt. She’s selfishly motivated, but everyone is young once and understands the pain of a first breakup. All the same,highlights the ways whiteness tends to stripmine other cultures for personal gain, ignoring historical bases for cultural mores and traditions and instead only seeing commodities for advantaging itself.
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