de facto film reviews 3 stars

Haiti is the ghost that plagues Bertrand Bonello, and in “Zombi Child” it is far from being a ghost film, and contrary to what the title leads you to believe, its also far from being a zombie film. Bonello’s latest feature film has a lot on its mind, and even if it was just another zombie film, it would be far from being just another brainless zombie movie as the film deals with the concept of zombification and many other resonant themes about privilege, oppression, and atonement. Abstract and startling by design, writer-director Bonello (“Saint Laurent”, “Nocturama”) petitions a richly stylized polemic about European colonialism, exploitation, ethnography, guilt, Haitian history, zombification, and voodoo. Bonello intertwines and structures a few story lines into two entirely different settings–1960s Haiti and an all-girls French boarding school set in modern day France.

While the film isn’t your typical horror or zombie film, it is still a layered and complex one, executed with ruminating ideas and a brooding atmosphere that holds enduring staying power. It creates a forlorn, onerous mood to set against the two settings that consists of the soil and land of Haiti in the first story, and the claustrophobic and isolated setting of the boarding school in the modern story. It’s as if the setting of Haiti itself is mourning for liberation from the draconian and oppressive forces at hand. Meanwhile, the mostly confined settings in the modern story represent the liberation of the repressed guilt the young girls hold from the past sins that are bestowed upon them.

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The film opens in Haiti in 1962. A mysterious man prepares a powdery substance into his pair of loafers. The following day, the man named Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou) collapses and “dies” in a crowded street. He is eventually buried by his family, only to be taken out of his grave where he is awakened from the dead the same night. He becomes a walking zombie and is taken to a sugarcane plantation in which he works routinely and internally contemplates. This becomes a film of postcolonial subtext, in which many men in Haiti and other parts of the world who are exploited for labor as Clairvius and his fellow workers are beautifully framed in ravishing day-for-night cinematography by Yves Cape.

Catapulting to modern France, we are introduced to Melissa (Wislanda Louimat), a young Haitian orphan–who lost both of her parents to the 2010 shattering earthquake in Haiti–is one of the students of the all-girls boarding school in Paris. She ends up building a friendship with Fanny (Louise Labeque), who bond over horror movies, rap music, and they both relate to each other because they both feel like outsiders. The film is mainly in Fanny’s perspective as she becomes the narrator, and what is fascinating is how unreliable of a narrator she is. In voice-overs that feel like fragmented lost love letters as she yearns for a boy she is infatuated with that lives far away.

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The entire film switches back and forth between the two timelines, pushing the audience to tie in the themes and ideas. In the opening of the film one of Melissa and Fanny’s teachers (Patrick Boucheron) proclaim that “France is guilty of trying to free the world”, this examines the concepts of unintended interventions and confronting the consequences from failures. The beauty of “Zombi Child” is how Bonello explores how everything in the modern era is connected to the past in some sort of fashion as history is often swept under the rug, left forgotten, or how modern France is left cached from its unresolved atonement of its colonial past sins.

Melissa is basically the only black pupil, she still carries her ancestral roots, and once Fanny discovers Melissa’s HAitian roots are indeed connected to Clairvius and Voodoo, she attempts to take advantage of this knowledge for her own selfish and personal gain. Bonello’s main ideas come in fruition in the third act, as Bonello cracks down all ignorance and preconceived notions of the origins of Voodoo, which developed as a resistance against slave traders. It is a mix of Catholicism and Western African pantheon beliefs. Bonello refuses to culturally appropriate the concepts of Voodoo, he dives deep into the origins. After his previous film, the exceptional “Nocturama”, Bonello has crafted another film about teenagers. Where “Nocturama” was about a group of teens plotting out a senseless terrorist attack in a French mall with no motivations, Bonello crafted a film about careless consumerism and a polemic on the struggles of youth culture. In “Zombi Child”, we see subtly how alien and remote Melissa’s culture brings to the privileged students, even as they are constantly appropriating cultures beside their own.

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It’s the modern stories involving Melissa and Fanny that succeed the most. The film’s flashbacks aren’t quite as engaging, but it does add to Benello’s social commentary that will probably only process even stronger on repeat viewings. While the Haiti settings are very woozy and elliptical, they could have been balanced stronger with more dramatic momentum and heightened tension. While the modern story takes the viewer down a metaphorical journey about how Frances past sins and ethos are carried into Haiti’s culture. What is telling is that Clairivus zombification was based on slavery, and we was enslaved by fellow Haitian’s, not French men. Bonello’s point is the unintended consequences that are generated by previous immoral behaviors that remain implemented in Frances socio-political history. “Zombi Child” is thus a unique film, one that unravels sharp sophistication that is deeply allegorical and indelible. It is a film that stays with you, boxing you into its uncertainties.

 

Zombi Child opens Thursday 2/20/20 at the Film Lab in Hamtramack, Michigan. Visit https://thefilmlab.org/ for showtimes

The Film Lab celebrates Detroit’s diverse community with a brand new bar and microcinema in Hamtramck

HOURS

Thu-Sat: 5-12midnight
Sun: 12noon-10pm

Happy Hour
Thu-Sat: 5-6:30

DIRECTIONS

The Film Lab is located at 3105 Holbrook Ave. in Hamtramck, Michigan.

 

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