After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (Bertrand Mandico, 2021) (Patreon)

I have a soft spot for Bertrand Mandico. Granted, I have yet to really embrace his films. That's because they are, for lack of a better way to put it, at war with themselves. Mandico is a fundamentally visual director, driven by outré imagery and amorphous sexuality. In any given frame of After Blue, you are liable to see objects and spaces that look like nothing else you've seen. This is not to say that he is an iconoclast. His work can really be traced to four primary antecedents: David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin, Ulrike Ottinger, and Jack Smith. He's into queer body-comedy and semi-sentient natural environments, and again, he's fascinated by the materiality of the image, the literal plastics of his rubber and papier maché mise-en-scene.

The problem, alas, is that he's not very adept at constructing a narrative. As it happens, Mandico spins the sorts of anarchic anti-stories that might make their disjointedness seem like a decision, if not exactly a virtue. But in many respects After Blue is a collection of avant-garde ideas lumbering along endlessly, logy and redundant. This not-quite-fatal flaw is perhaps best exemplified by After Blue's dominant joke. The vicious outlaw who must be killed is a Polish woman named Katarzyna Buszowska, but she is colloquially referred to as "Kate Bush." So every time she's mentioned in the film, we implicitly compare her hairy, muscular mien with that of Britain's #1 ethereal songstress. Hardy-har-har.

Oddly enough, After Blue is kind of a Western. On the beach one day, young Roxy (Paula Luna) finds a woman buried to her neck in sand. Roxy's a bit of an outcast, and the mystery lady's promise of three wishes is too much to resist. Once she's free, Kate Bush (Agata Buzek) kills Roxy's three companions and begins a psychotic murder spree across the countryside. She's an outlaw, and the community demands that Roxy's mother Zora (the great Elina Löwensohn) must track Kate Bush down and kill her. And of course, Zora and Roxy encounter many dubious characters along the way.

One might almost suspect that Mandico grasped for the comfort of genre as a way to organize his intricate set designs and bizarre premises. The world of planet After Blue is a post-Earth colony, a place where all the men died and only the women remain. The atmosphere is hazy and purple, everything abuzz with floating film grain. Gender is fluid, but sexual aggression is ubiquitous, again suggesting that Mandico wanted a pretext that allowed him to depict S/M power play without running afoul of political correctness. 

All of the invention on display makes it all the more frustrating that After Blue is such a slog. I didn't much care for Mandico's last feature, Wild Boys, but its Peter Pan / Capt. Hook structure did provide a basic sense of movement. After Blue is about 80% throat-clearing, as Mandico lingers over Kate's psycho-sexual hold over Roxy, the matriarchs forcing Zora to accept the task of hunting Kate, the two women meeting Kate's mother and sister, and finally getting waylaid (and laid-laid) by Sternberg (Vimala Pons), a mountain-dwelling painter, and her male-ish sex robot Olgar 2 (Michaël Erpelding). It's a long wind-up for a rather sloppy pitch, as the eventual showdown is a nonstarter as well.

Nevertheless, we take in all sorts of neon boulders and oozing plant life along the way. Nobody combines saturated color with viscosity quite like Mandico. Okay, maybe Yann Gonzalez, who is part of the scene that spawned Mandico as well. But Gonzalez is willing to kill his babies, sacrificing wild style for narrative coherence. Mandico not so much. His fascination with Guy Maddin's neo-archaisms is evident. (When you think about it, Maddin's impact on contemporary film culture is sorely under-acknowledged.) But unfortunately After Blue most resembles Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Maddin's weakest effort.

Still, I'm glad this fellow is out there, making these perverse, unwieldy films. I realize it may seem like special pleading, but I do think Mandico's distinctive vision justifies itself, even when the director fails to give it a meaningful shape. After all, Mandico may eventually learn to be a storyteller, if that's what he really wants to do. But it's a lot less likely that some drab industry hack will suddenly sprout a personality. You in spite of its obvious weaknesses, I consider After Blue one to grow on.