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Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-11-23 23:49:30 +0000 UTC
A perplexing film in that it is so simple and direct, you could come away thinking perhaps you missed something, some mitigating nuance that would make the project more worthwhile. It's a Bonello film, and so it is gorgeous and intelligent and meticulously constructed. But where films like Nocturama, House of Tolerance, and Tiresia contain elements of the surreal, the macabre, or the otherwise inexplicable, Zombi Child feels very much like the careful articulation of a thesis.
In fact, I wonder whether race is the culprit here. Bonello has made a film that is unambiguous in its condemnation of France's colonial past and its lingering historical and cultural impact on Haiti, and uses the abuse and misunderstanding of voodoo as the articulating link between the past and present. However, there is a neatness to Zombi Child that perhaps speaks to Bonello's outsider status, of his abiding need to "get everything right." A Haitian filmmaker, with more skin in the game but also more cultural license, might have been able to make things messier.
As it is, Zombi Child is essentially a textbook study on capitalist exploitation and white privilege, with a bifurcated structure that shows how seemingly disconnected events are part of the same chain of oppression. In the 1970s, we witness the plight of Clairvius (Mackenson Bijou), a Haitian man who is "zombified" and forced to labor in the sugar cane fields. As Bonello shows it, zombification is nothing so mystical. Rather, certain voodoo priests serve as Kapos for the capitalist class, kidnapping and poisoning young men with drugs that render them docile, servile, and devoid of memory -- the ideal slave class.
Meanwhile, in the present, we see a French school for elite girls, one of whom, Melissa (Wislanda Louimat) is a Haitian girl who was orphaned in the 2010 earthquake. She lives with her Aunt Katy (Katiana Milfort) who is a "Mambo" or voodoo priestess. After some suspicion bred of typical mean-girl nonsense and wypipo racism, a clique of girls accepts Melissa, and one girl in particular, Fanny (Louise Labeque), tries to become Melissa's good friend.
Much of the disconnect in this section comes from Melissa's awkward fit in the girls' school -- the fact that she is the only nonwhite student, the fact that her stories of Haiti and its religion are both mocked and fetishized, and Fanny's fascination with her in particular seems borne of this strange combination of attraction and fear. Bonello is making some rather obvious points about the limits of colonial charity and liberal benevolence, but in an unexpected turn, Zombi Child ultimately ends up being about Fanny, her encounter with Katy, and her demand that the Mambo perform a ritual on her behalf.
This is the only point in the film where it feels as though Bonello is going outside the lines of the expected colonial-hangover narrative and generating something provocative and uncanny. What happens between Fanny and Katy is a form of exploitation that we don't normally see, in which the French girl demands that the Other solve her literal First-World Problem by becoming the film's Magical Negro. What Zombi Child offers in the place of the customary bromides -- wisdom, forced companionship, reassurance -- is something much more frightening. It's nothing less than the Return of the Repressed.
