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 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.

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.

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.