Fantastic Fest 2021: "After Blue (Dirty Paradise)" Is One Strange Plains Drifter
French visionary Bertrand Mandico creates a queer ode to Kate Bush with his sophomore feature, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), which recently had its U.S. premiere at Austin, Texas’ Fantastic Fest. This esoteric, sapphic-surrealist sci-fi acid western reaffirms Mandico’s penchant for conceiving highly imaginative fantastic worlds, but it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. The film is a frequency, and you’re either on it or you’re not.
On a mysterious new planet populated entirely by women, teenager Roxy and her mother undergo a fantastical journey in pursuit of a murderous criminal.
Writer/director Betrand Mandico is a great builder of mesmerizingly inventive worlds. He showcased that in his gender-fluid debut, The Wild Boys (Les Garçons Sauvages), which largely took place on a mysterious island where boys (actually played by women) slowly transform into women, but he’s cranked the dial to the nth degree with his latest vibrant vision, After Blue (Dirty Paradise). The film is a strange fantasy/fairytale phantasmagoria that transports viewers to a lively new world full of bizarro sci-fi flourishes and lesbian kink. Imagine Fantastic Planet, Barbarella, El Topo, Dark Crystal, and Hardware dropped acid, had an orgy, and gave birth to a perverse avant-garde art house Star Wars full of horny, hairy French Princess Leias. That starts to get us close.
The film takes place in a distance future and transports us to the titular dirty paradise: After Blue. In a hypnotic exposition dump (one of the few instances in which its world is ever directly explained), we’re told that humans left Earth in search of another planet to call home, and they stumbled upon After Blue, a bizarre world that’s inhospitable to men. Women are the only ones left to wander its hazy landscapes ripe with alluring oddity, and they keep humanity alive through artificial insemination. That’s how we’re told our protagonist, lonely teenager Roxy — or “Toxic” as she’s referred to by bullies — was born.
One day, Roxy comes across a head buried in the shimmering smog of a beach that belongs to a feral woman by the name of Kate Bush (or Katiana Babooshka), a woman who would “cut her own horse’s throat while listening to disco,” and who was also buried for some unknown crime. Out of pity (and because she’s promised three wishes), Roxy frees Kate Bush from the fate of a rising tide. Kate immediately repays her, too, by killing her bullies — something she claims was Roxy’s first wish — before immediately fleeing the scene. As a result of Roxy’s actions, the village forces her and her mother, the local hairdresser (played by frequent Mandico collaborator Elina Löwensohn), into an ultimatum: kill Kate Bush or be banished forever. Thus begins Mandico’s erotic, strange-plains-drifting sci-fi spaghetti western, and from there it becomes more amorphous, liquid, vaporous, and difficult to nail down.
Visually and sonically lush, After Blue is like inhaling a dream with your eyes and ears — one which you cannot smell (thankfully) but can palpably sense. It’s elusive, slow moving, and meandering; it’s an attitude, a mood, a frequency. It’s all atmosphere, pungent and lacquered so thick it’s sure to give you a contact high. This is the film’s sole aim, and those viewers looking for narrative coherence are going to be disappointed.
It should be pointed out that Mandico is the founder of the Incoherence Manifesto, which opts for “a romantic approach, unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike, cinegenic, an epic narration” over the conventional. After Blue leans all the way into that and creates a shimmering chimerical odyssey that runs in place, yet still manages to take you places. Mandico does what he wants, indulging in his own pleasures as well as that of the film’s world, making choices that service a feeling above all else. You don’t have to bother with trying to follow it. You just drift with it and let it wash over you. That’s about all you can do.
As for what it’s about exactly, Kate Bush seems to be a key component, literally and figuratively. Essentially, Mandico visually captures the otherworldly whimsy of her voice, the oddity and evocative quality of her music, and even though none of Bush’s music appears in the film, you can hear it. When the film’s antagonist appears in sensual rain-soaked visions, you can hear “Cloudbursting” (“Every time it rains, you’re here in my head”). The planet’s noxious miasma that renders it uninhabitable for men recalls “This Woman’s Work” (“Oh it's hard on a man. Now his part is over”), as does the many moments in which our characters must preserve and push on (“I know you've got a little life in you left”). You can also hear the haunting jangly melody of “Babooshka” as the characters traverse the strange terrain. Of course, there’s also “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” which says it all: “C'mon, angel, c'mon, c'mon, darling, let's exchange the experience.”
The biggest gripe about the whole experience is that it is 40 minutes too long. If this were cut down to 90 minutes, it would be an absolute winner, but its long-winded flatline of an adventure becomes too exhaustive and stagnant at points. It’s an endurance test, but it entrances you with striking visuals and sheer imagination along the way.
There isn’t much substance — and that’s gonna turn off a lot of folks — yet there’s something we found resinous about it. We’d call it a grower, not a shower. Initially, we were lukewarm on the mystical and heady plateau-like experience that After Blue delivered, but in the days that followed, its strange and tactile dreamscapes have lingered in our mind. Seek it out, and let it haunt you, too.
Recommendation: This one is definitely not going to be for everyone, but it’s certainly an experience worth subjecting yourself to. If you’re a fan of hyper-stylish oddity and aren’t bothered by style over substance, surrender to After Blue’s dirty paradise and let it transport you to another world!
Rating: 4 designer pistols outta 5.
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!