You get out of the RER A, in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), you cross the André-Malraux park and bypass the body of water that seems to separate life on earth from hell. But no man in the boat on the Styx, the descent begins on a small steep and wet path leading to the entrance of the artists of the Théâtre des Amandiers… Friday March 12, 9 am. The man with the beard (brown, abundant) who officiates between stage and bleachers is called Bertrand Mandico. Born in 1971, author of around thirty short films and a first dreamlike, sensual and feverish “feature”, The Wild Boys (2018), with actresses in male roles, the filmmaker was invited by the director of the National Dramatic Center (CDN), the director Philippe Quesne, while the latter was completing his mandate at Les Amandiers – Christophe Rauck succeeded him on 1er January.
Responding to the invitation to create in a theater, Bertrand Mandico proposed a “free rereading” and feminized of Conan the Barbarian, named after the character imagined in the 1930s by the American writer Robert E. Howard, and the film (1982) by John Milius. In Conan the Barbarian, several actresses play the heroine at different ages: Claire Duburcq, Camille Rutherford, Sandra Parfait, Karoline Rose Sun… “It will be” the “Barbarian and no longer” the “: a woman who tells about herself through a show from the underworld where she reigns, nostalgic for her own horrors”, explains Bertrand Mandico, who hears “Empty excess virility” of the initial work, adapted for cinema with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
To feminize is to eroticize, it is also to take an offbeat look, in a strange or burlesque vein, on this chain of barbarities perpetrated by men since the dawn of time. Bertrand Mandico shoots on film and sublimates his war scenarios with the grace of ultra-stylized images, tinkered with his super-16 camera. If we recognize his aesthetic at first glance, it is because it is crossed by a tissue of influences that belong only to him, from erotic Japanese cinema to the poet, singer and punk director FJ Ossang, from Jean Cocteau to Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, from Federico Fellini to David Lynch.
“Mise en abyme”
The team of Conan …, produced by Emmanuel Chaumet (Ecce Films) and Antoine Garnier (Orphée Films), took over the National Dramatic Center of Nanterre in November 2020, up to the male toilets and their row of urinals which were tagged in black, in a style no future. A small number of collaborators, faithful to Bertrand Mandico, take part in the adventure, joined by a few newcomers, such as the theater playwright Marion Stoufflet. On the big stage, we also discover the vestiges of the shooting of the day before, a compression of bodies, more or less dismembered, as well as a pool of reddened water under the filter of a projector, which overhangs the throne of the ” Queen of the Barbarians ”.
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