After Blue (Paradis sale)

OK, this movie shouldn't be watched like a 'normal' movie. It should simply be watched for what it is, namely a piece of art. The scenario, who gives a damn. In most movies I do give a damn, but not in this one. Bertrand Mandico makes it quite clear you shouldn't. I read in another review that one should just let him/herself be immersed in the strange and wondrous universe created by this movie. That hits the nail.

It's a visual masterpiece, full of colours and art. The weirdness of the encounters just makes you laugh. I definitely need to rewatch this on acid.

I especially love the western kind of feeling to it.

This is truly something, instant cult!

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.

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 one of his films Woody Allen awoke in a panic gasping "No more Polish women!". He could have had this film - awash with strong Slavic faces - in mind, although the copious quantities of tobacco the sinister coven in wide-brimmed black hats consume betrays it's gallic origins.

It posits that time-honoured fantasy of a future in which only women survive and with the shackles of patriarchy thrown off inevitably turn upon each other.

Awash with hot girl-on-girl action, Freudian symbols like a horse draped in a veil, carnivorous caterpillars, women with hairy arms lasciviously handling guns and lines like "Would you like some purple soup?" it's all so earnest you suspect a leg-pull, and a wanted poster bearing the name 'Kate Bush' certainly indicates that someone's tongue was in their cheek.

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.