Kokon (Leonie Krippendorff, 2020) is a profoundly queer film that deploys some of the techniques of both haptic visuality and slow cinema (Flanagan, 2012) in order to portray the journey of sexual self-discovery of Nora, a German teenager...
moreKokon (Leonie Krippendorff, 2020) is a profoundly queer film that deploys some of the techniques of both haptic visuality and slow cinema (Flanagan, 2012) in order to portray the journey of sexual self-discovery of Nora, a German teenager whose identity does not fit within the limiting confines of heteronormativity. She is metaphorically compared to a caterpillar that throughout her coming-of-age summer will blossom out of her cocoon once she leaves the closet (hence the title), occupying that in-between space that Judith Halberstam associates with pre-adult girlhood, with “the not fully realized” (2003: 328). The summer setting of the love story between Nora and Romy -an older teenage girl- allows the director to explore the queerness of improductive, dead times where nothing seems to be happening; according to Edelman (2004:13), “surplus desire erupts when times are not regulated or productive” partially because LGBTIQ+ desires are located outside reproductive futurism. As Schoonover explains, “when an innocent soul” -in this case Nora- finds herself “with too much time on [her] hands, the threat of too much time often gets coded as a vulnerability to homosexuality” (2012: 73): we see her constantly luxuriating in the pool, “wasting time” with her peers or lying bored on her bed, and it is in these seemingly innocent moments where her fascination toward Romy arises.
Nominated for a Teddy Award in the last edition of the Berlin Film Festival, and showcased at the Lesgaicinemad Film Festival in Madrid, Leonie Krippendorff’s second film inscribes the protagonist’s queer (teen) sexuality on her filmic text as “a destabilizing force that produces a different model of visuality” (Galt, 2013: 65): a haptic, tactile visuality that appeals to the spectator’s senses beyond the sight (Marks, 2000). Through images of texture, touch and water -generally associated with a fluid, queer way of "being in the world" (Ahmed, 2006)- overexposed shots and disorienting closeups, the female director brings us particularly close to the bodily sensations of the queer teen protagonist, evoking the materiality of the filmic image in a manner that does not allow us to perceive her as a distant, disembodied Other. The appeal to the sensual and the bodily is also present in the film’s constant instrumentalization of the abject (Kristeva, 1982): “disgusting” fluids such as menstrual blood, vomit and spit take a fundamental role in the film’s construction of queer teenage girlhood.
