66 | FILMCOMMENT|July-August 2019daughter). Bonello’s movies act equally on
the head and on the gut, combining cerebral
gambits with electrifying filmmaking. They
develop meaning and implication though
dialectical friction, playing with dichotomies
of then and now, inside and outside, the real
and the mythic. The historian Patrick
Boucheron shows up in an early scene of
Zombi Child, delivering a lecture to Fanny’s
class in which he rejects a linear narrative of
historical progress and proposes a view of
history as “discontinuous, sputtering, hesi-
tant,” its currents forever disappearing and
reemerging. This describes equally well the
torque of Bonello’s singular films: the
increasingly feverish cross-cutting of Zombi
Childbuilds, as in House of Toleranceand
Nocturama, to a collapse of time and space,
a dissolution of selves, a rearrangement of
hierarchies and assumptions.T
he croisette this year was thick
not just with zombies, as many
observers noted, but also with
numerous examples of cinema as
an instrument of mummification and rean-
imation, none more vivid than Quentin
Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time... in Holly-
wood, among the most anticipated titles in
the Competition. The film’s premise is one
that will apparently never die, namely that
the ’60s—or to be precise, the end of the
’60s—changed everything. With typically
fetishistic attention to world-building
period detail, Tarantino conjures up the cos-
tumes, cars, mansions, backlots, and pop
paraphernalia of 1969 Hollywood, a prelap-
sarian idyll that he imbues with a deep
longing. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dal-
ton, a television star on the wane, with Brad
Pitt as Cliff Booth, his stunt double and loyal
sidekick. Rick’s new neighbors on Cielo Drive
happen to be Roman Polanski and Sharon
Tate—an intrusion of the real that casts a pall
over what is for long stretches a supremely
easygoing buddy movie, turning Rick and
Cliff into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
figures of a sort, obliviously waiting in the
wings of an impending tragedy.
The ending that Tarantino implored crit-
ics not to spoil is hardly a surprise—it’s
simply another expression of his crazy
faith in cinema to create a parallel uni-
verse, although this particular salvo of
counterfactual violence feels more personal
than the ones in Inglourious Basterdsand
Django Unchained.As the film progresses,
the potentially off-putting nostalgia builtT
his year’s cannes opened with a zombie comedy by jim jarmusch; the rest
of the festival reminded us that there are multiple ways in which the dead
don’t die. A highlight of the Directors’ Fortnight section, Bertrand Bonello’s
Zombi Child is, among other things, an intervention: a vigorous attempt to
complicate the position that the zombie figure has long occupied in Western
pop culture, from Bela Lugosi through George Romero to the continuing
onslaught of living-dead narratives. Like almost all such stories, Zombi Childcapitalizes
on the zombie’s semiotic adaptability, his suggestive capacity for metaphor. But unlike
most of them, it takes seriously the historical origins of the zombie myth in the brutal
conditions of slavery in French-ruled Haiti. The zombi—as first understood and as
spelled in the original Creole—was a deceased field hand who was condemned to an
afterlife of eternal labor, a fate worse than death.
Zombi Childbegins in 1962, in Haiti, where in a series of brisk, clipped scenes, a man
is subject to a process of zombification: poisoned, buried, revived, and sent to the sugar-
cane plantations. Mindful that this story, with its roots in vodou traditions, is not neces-
sarily his to tell—or at least to tell from just any perspective—Bonello frames the movie
from the present-day vantage of a Parisian girls’ boarding school reserved for the off-
spring of Legion of Honor recipients. It is within these privileged confines that teenage
Fanny (Louise Labèque) develops an interest in the school’s one black student, Mélissa
(Wislanda Louimat), orphaned in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. As the girls bond over their
shared love of horror movies and the controversial rapper Damso (whose music plays a
key role), and as Fanny begins to wonder if aspects of her new friend’s ancestry might be
of use in solving some personal problems, the film cuts repeatedly to the zombie roaming
the Haitian countryside, who turns out to be Clairvius Narcisse. A rare instance of a doc-
umented zombie case, Narcisse was the subject of a study by the anthropologist Wade
Davis, which in turn inspired Wes Craven’s 1988 The Serpent and the Rainbow.
As befits a film about syncretic beliefs, Zombi Childis a sometimes disorienting, often
thrilling conflation of genres: a horror-tinged fantasy built on documentary specificity and
haunted by the specter of history. Written, shot, and edited in the space of a year, it is a more
straightforward endeavor than his last two features, Nocturama and Saint Laurent, but
Bonello has clearly taken pains to get the details just right, from the use of vodou terminol-
ogy (like loaand Bizango) to the precise cadences of sardonic teenspeak (he credits hisFESTIVALS Cannes
Dreams Never End
The undead were not the only things to take on
new life at a resilient CannesBY DENNIS LIM
Zombi Child