Dreams Never End

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 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, capitalizes 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