After Blue (Paradis sale)

It's kitch, we know. But the photography is exquisite, the music score is solid, and the acting is convincing. The plot gets a bit confusing in the last 30 mins, some events are not very clear, but overall it's a hell of a trip. Recommended if you're into B movies.

In principle, I am very fond of films that don't look or behave like other films. On that basis, this film scores very highly indeed.

Lots of inventiveness in the scene-setting, lights and costumes disguise what was probably a fairly limited budget but (like the films of Anna Biller) this carries through into a singular vision. The plot could have been a bit more substantial perhaps, but the increasingly frequent mentions of "Kate Bush" (officially Katarzyna Buszowska) are very entertaining - and I wondered whether the cast had trouble keeping straight faces having to say that all the time...?

In any case, if you make it through to the end, there is some sort of resolution to the quest that had me in mind of the great "Singing Ringing Tree", in that I really didn't ask too many questions, just went along for the ride - just like I did 55 years ago with the latter...

Recommended, if you like that sort of thing.

AFTER BLUE is a French science fiction film set on a planet populated entirely by women. It seems to have been designated as some kind of visionary masterpiece by the director but instead it feels like a pretentious exercise in voyeurism. The plot revolves around the hunt for a character called Kate Bush, I kid you not, but it's all played out in such po-faced seriousness that the whole thing becomes an embarassment after about five minutes' screen time. Like a modern-day Jean Rollin, the director pads his film out with endless nudity and scenes of female bodies being entwined, but the end result is dull, superficial, and extraordinarily shallow.

I recently watched the French film After Blue (2022) on Shudder. Set on a planet inhabited solely by women, the story follows a teenager who accidentally frees a notorious assassin. As punishment, she is ostracized from her community and tasked with hunting down and killing the fugitive to redeem herself.

Written and directed by Bertrand Mandico (The Wild Boys), the film stars Elina Löwensohn (Schindler's List), Vimala Pons (Elle), Agata Buzek (Redemption), and Alexandra Stewart (Exodus).

This is one of the most unique and visually striking worlds I've seen in a long time. It reminded me of MTV Oddities or Liquid Television, with its surreal, dreamlike aesthetic. The film features more nudity than I expected, but it feels organic to the universe and its depicted lifestyle. The set design, costumes, makeup, and hairstyling are stunning-like a blend of The Bride with White Hair and Labyrinth. The performances are immersive, pulling you into the world, and the cast is captivating.

Stylistically, the film mixes elements of soft erotica, science fiction, and horror, featuring some impressively eerie corpses along the way. The eye effects are a bit rough, but they add to the film's quirky charm. After Blue is difficult to categorize, but it's an artistically bold experience with a lot happening beneath the surface.

In conclusion, After Blue is part softcore fantasy, part sci-fi, part horror, and entirely its own thing. I'd rate it a 7/10 and recommend it if you're looking for something truly different.

On a planet in a distant galaxy, colonized by women when the Earth got sick, Roxy (aka Toxic), rescues Katarzyna Buszowska (aka Kate Bush), who has been buried up to her neck in sand to await death by the incoming tide. Roxy's merciful act unleashes a tide of misfortune on her friends, as Kate Bush turns out to be a killer. The village's coven of elders therefore order Roxy (Paula-Luna Breitenfelder) and her hairdresser mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) to pursue and kill Kate Bush, a task that takes them into sci-fi western territory, as they ride off with designer weapons on an amateurish bounty hunt that turns out to be a sexual and spiritual odyssey for them both.

Nothing could have prepared them, or the viewer, for what they encounter as they travel inland - hallucinogenic caterpillars, giant fungi, monstrous creatures of various sorts, and a pretentious artist called Sternberg (Vimala Pons) with her male android partner. Director Bertrand Mandico overwhelms the viewer with a torrent of bizarre imaginings - the lesbian jacuzzi session that takes place in the entrails of a recently deceased antediluvian creature isn't the half of it.

The living planet with its sexualized flora is a field day for Freudians, and the film is obviously saying something about female liberation from the patriarchy, though exactly what is anyone's guess. Is it indeed a dirty paradise, or a world just as violent as the male-dominated Earth was? This is a true work of surrealism, from which you can take any message you can find, or none. Kate Bush has a third eye (no spoilers here, but it's not in her forehead) and we are invited to have our own spiritual awakening, not though being preached at, but by allowing this seductive stream of weirdness to float us out of normality.

Although the film never runs out of ideas, I found the two hours plus running time overlong. The plot is confusing, though arguably that's the point of it. If you want something different, After Blue certainly delivers: it's so bonkers it's beyond good or bad, and it is difficult to think of another film like this one. Perhaps if Tarkovsky had directed Barbarella it would have been something like this.