After Blue - Dirty Paradise

Blue Angels
Killing Kate Bush

After Blue - Dirty Paradise
aka After Blue - Paradise Sale
aka After Blue
Directed by Bertand Mandico
France 2021
Vinegar Syndrome Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Conceptual spoilers ahead.

After Blue - Dirty Paradise is a relatively new movie, being a real feast for the visual and aural senses for cinema goers who are less invested in the mechanics of a plot and more interested in the dazzling excesses of the medium to create a sense of atmosphere, it seems to me. Actually, of the few people I’ve seen writing about this film for short summaries, there seems to be a complete lack of understanding or, perhaps, just a blanket statement that there isn’t much of a story or plot to latch onto. Some people are saying it’s completely impenetrable/ incomprehensible or plotless too. Well, there certainly is a story to be found in this one but it’s simplistic and, well, kinda redundant in terms of much of a follow through.... the writer/director seems far more fixated on the substance of the stylistic splendor, it seems to me, rather than add any more layers of detail to the through line. Although, his world building is perhaps also obfuscating the view for some people, I suspect.

Okay, the plot is fairly simple and so I will deal with it here.

We have Roxy (aka Toxic) played by model Paula Luna (she does a pretty good job here) and, as her mother Zora, the community hairdresser, there’s Elina Löwensohn. Yep, that Elina Löwensohn, from the Hal Hartley movies... I think the last thing I saw her in was the excellent Let The Corpses Tan (reviewed here) and, it has to be said that, despite the film featuring oodles of female nudity and girl/girl relationships throughout, I actually just picked this one up because I wanted to see what Löwensohn was doing these days. But I digress... after Earth has perished, the survivors find a planet they call After Blue and live in segregated, racial colonies (the Scottish contingent seem a bit aggressive), following the rules of the planet. The men all perish because the atmosphere of the world causes all their body hair to grow inwards and smother them from the inside (if I’m understanding the opening premise correctly).

Anyway, one day Roxy unearths an assassin who has been buried up to her neck in sand, waiting for the tide to come in and drown her. Her name is Katarzyna Buszowska (played by Agata Buzek) but she is generally known as Kate Bush. She grants three wishes to Roxy but leaves after she construes Roxy’s secret wish is to kill her friends and so she does. She also has a third eye which appears in her vagina. She disappears and then the community aggressively send Zora and Roxy on a mission to hunt down and kill Kate Bush. 

The film then becomes a road movie where they meet interesting people such as Sternberg (played by Vimala Pons) with her male looking android, strange places such as forests populated by both art and some unusual, organic, sinister tree like beings called Indiams and, of course, the gals get into strange and mostly philosophical adventures as they verbally explore their surroundings on their quest. That’s the whole thing more or less and, there’s a certain sense of closure to the story but not much as the success of the mission, it seemed to me, is not as cut and dried as it might have been (and for an extra layer of doubt, stick around for a short, post credits scene).

But the story is not what the film is about. It’s a completely psychedelic romp with all kinds of heavily saturated hues bombarding the visuals at all times. It’s also not a traditional road movie either... at one point the local community are all dressed up reminiscent of Meiko Kaji in the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies and, not long after when Löwensohn adopts the same hat, brandishing her winchester-like Chanel (all the weapons seem to be named after perfume or fashion brands)... it becomes clear that this particular road movie is also very much a revisionist western. Indeed, it certainly did remind me of the kind of hollowed out, soulless Spaghetti Westerns people like Lucio Fulci were making at the tail end of the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Now the film has been compared to Barbarella quite a lot (and I’m guessing that’s to both the cinematic version and the original strip) and I can see how the director has certainly tried to look back to these and other psychedelic films of the late 1960s but, for me, it feels like it’s been filtered through a 1980s lens. It’s exactly the kind of movie I would have expected to see ‘back in the day’ in a venue like the Everyman, Hampstead (back when it was a great cinema with essential programming) or the SCALA. One especially vivid sense of 1980s inspired deja vu comes in the opening as we are asked to follow a female voice into the story in precisely the same kind of way as we are invited by Max Von Sydow to do the same at the opening of Europa (which I think was called Zentropa in a lot of countries other than the UK). So, yeah, it hits a certain kind of audience member right in the 80s, I suspect.

The voice interrogating Roxy is what then gives us the story but the flashbacks to the story are also intruded upon by the narrative. You at first think the character is breaking the fourth wall but it soon becomes apparent that she’s speaking to her interrogators from the memory of her experiences and that, occasionally, people in those memories think she’s talking to them... which is kind of a nice, stealth reveal when the realisation sets in. And as I write these words now, I’m struck by the realisation that the post credit scene of the film actually reveals exactly who she’s talking to... so I’m glad I waited until the next day to let it sink in before I started to write this review.

And it’s a joy to watch, not just for its visual ideas but also for its conceptual ideas. For instance, when Roxy crawls under her house she delves into a tin of worm like creatures (obviously contraband) and then lights one as it wiggles around and smokes it like a cigarette. Or a nice visual moment where a table is held up on legs clothed in Wellington boots. And it all looks incredibly beautiful, of course. Completely stagy and fake but, that’s part of it’s charm. And, cliché of an expression or not, the colour palette throughout totally looks like Mario Bava was tripping on some kind of psychedelic drug. There’s a fair amount of rain in the movie too... which is something I quite like to see and, this combined with the heightened, saturated colours certainly gives a nice visual treat. For instance, a shot of Elina Löwensohn rolling around in the mud near the end but with her body and environment bathed in a neon green is pretty interesting.

And that’s me pretty much done with After Blue - Dirty Paradise for the time being... I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody but it’s pretty good for fans of pure cinema where the style is as important (if not more so) than the story content. I also think that when I revisit this one, it’s going to grow on me a lot more and be a much richer experience than my first peek, that’s for sure. And, lets face it, where are you going to find another film with lines like... “I felt Kate Bush in my mouth.” So, yeah, if you get the opportunity, maybe take a look at this one... I’m glad I did. I'm looking forward now to trying to the same director's new Conan movie... where the spelling is changed to Conann and the character is played by five different actresses at different stages of his life.