After Blue (Paradis sale)

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.

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.

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.