After Blue (Paradis sale)

After Blue is a world in a different galaxy, with only women. All men are dead. We meet Roxy walking along a beach, taunted by three women who don't like her, and refer to her as Toxic. They come across a head in the sand, which is actually a person buried up to her neck. The three tell her to leave her buried, but she digs her out, and is granted three wishes. She wishes the three would leave her alone, and the woman, Kate Bush, kills them. (Monkey's Paw, anyone?) Her mother, along with her, are sent on a quest. Along the way, others join, and they have weapons. The weapons have names: Chanel, Guicci, Paul Smith and Louis Vuitton. The movie is French, is surreal, so one immerses into the visual aspects, the coloration, the tints, the goo, the fog, the overlaid layers, and one will either appreciate it for art, or consider it garbage. Each person who makes it through the entire movie will likely have a different take on what it is about. The sets are really what makes the movie, as they are strange and really outer worldly.

After Blue (Dirty Paradise) has been described as the best lesbian acid Western ever made. This is unquestionably true.

Most folks expect films to make sense and follow certain conventions. This one does not. It defies most categories---expect maybe "art house".

Watch it after consuming your substance of choice before entering this realm.

Watch it while making love to someone you may or may not love.

DON'T THINK ABOUT IT. Just relax and let the miasma wash over you.

And most of all, keep asking yourself, "Have I killed Kate Bush yet?"

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 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.