After Blue
From time to time, a new movie gains relevance by relating or echoing recent events or a certain national mood. For “After Blue (Dirty Paradise),” it’s the needle drop. A villain called “Kate Bush” the name is repeated about 100 times over the film features in French director Bertrand Mandico’s latest exercise in psychedelic sci-fi minimalism.
And it just so happens that this week, when the real Kate Bush hit an unexpected No. 1 on iTunes after “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” was used in Season 2022 of “Stranger Things,” the Polish actor Agata Buzek takes on the role of a rogue vigilante named “Kate Bush” (a.k.a. Katarzyna Buzowska), who has an eyeball in her vagina and wreaks havoc on some planet called After Blue after being dug up by a teenager named Roxy (Paula Luna) from pink, foamy sand in which she’d been buried as punishment by the all-female Polish space military, which for some reason hates hair and Poles among other things.
For this reason alone, anyone who becomes acquainted with Kate through some algorithmic confluence of keywords isn’t going to learn anything new about her from seeing this film, although they may well have their understanding of her further muddled: In below the line terms, After Blue makes no sense whatsoever.”
In retribution for what Roxy and her mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) have done to bring death and destruction upon the French-speaking peoples of After Blue, they are required to wait inside an alien mine shaft somewhere deep within treacherous wintery terrain until “Kate Bush” comes back, at which point they must kill her and thereby redeem themselves. This is roughly what two-plus hours’ worth of science-fiction/fantasy/Western plot amounts to in Mandico’s latest, which serves as little more than a skeleton for the director to drape with various aesthetic and/or erotic fixations.
But let’s backtrack for a moment: At the beginning of “After Blue,” a voice purrs, “You are no longer on your planet. You are in space.” As if that really needed to be said. After Blue the post Earth colony inhabited by human “ovarian bearers” (those without ovaries die soon after birth, choking on their own hair) where our story takes place does indeed look like it was created by someone who had just come from one very intense Kate Bush listening session too many.”
There are bovine creatures with geodes for heads roaming the countryside, which is strewn with crystals and dusted with glitter that sticks to all the hair growing out of everyone’s shoulders and necks (hair is big in this movie). The people of After Blue wear witchy black outfits that seem cribbed from “American Horror Story: Coven” by way of “Female Prisoner Scorpion.” No technology is allowed into or used on After Blue because reasons, so the film’s sole male esque figure a designer pleasure-bot named Olgar-2 (Michaël Erpelding) represents contraband. Sensual goop drips from alien trees’ branches and neon/blacklight paint is put to creative/aesthetically pleasing use.
The impression is equally a metaphysical store and Moebius the French sci-fi artist of that name who is influential for his work in comics, bandes dessinées, and films and it’s delightful, especially if you like floppy hats or chunky geode jewelry. Sadly, the amount of effort put into building the world of “After Blue” is not matched by character development or narrative arc.
It has to be admitted that it is very French to have a movie where people spend half their time at dinner parties talking about how art needs to be liberated from conventional morals before they make out in a hot tub. (The hot tub is formed from the bisected torso of a megalithic alien creature whose warm viscera are apparently great for the skin.)
But “After Blue” calls itself a sci-fi/fantasy epic, and though it certainly sprawls across multiple settings over its long running time, it ultimately feels small. Not that there’s anything wrong with the film’s art department: Their sets and costumes are cleverer than one might expect given their relatively low budget (though still pretty low). The problem here is Mandico’s script, which tends to pace things so as to draw out the filler portions of the story and underemphasize the dramatically essential parts.
“After Blue” would maybe be better received as an installation than as a movie; it’s more fun to talk about than it was to watch. But boy, is it fun to talk about. Did we mention that Roxy smokes cigarettes that wiggle like caterpillars when you light them, or that Olgar-2 has tentacles on his dick?
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