AFTER BLUE is an erotic dream set in a dirty paradise of sapphic sci-fi
Written and directed by Bertrand Mandico
Starring Elina Löwensohn, Vimala Pons, Agata Buzek, and Paula Luna
Runtime: 2 hours and 8 minutes
Available in select theaters starting June 3
by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer
Part of the reason I was interested in After Blue is because of the aesthetic of the film. I haven’t been reviewing a lot of films for MovieJawn since focusing on TVJawn, but I’ve discovered that to pull me out of my small screen tunnel vision something really has to appeal to my hedonistic sensibilities. Which doesn’t always mean that something has to look as lush and specific as After Blue does, but it’s certainly helpful. These days I’m often a bird, drawn in by something shiny.
After Blue is a French film from experimental filmmaker Bertrand Mandico. It’s his second feature, after the 2017 award-winning film The Wild Boys and many shorts. From what I can tell, his is style is a riot of lush, sexually-charged images of people on the cusp of something awesome - in the true sense of the word. And After Blue falls in the same vein. Set in a dystopian sci-fi future, the film follows Roxy (Paula Luna) who lives on After Blue, the planet that humanity fled to after Earth went the way of the dodo. Except all the men died shortly after they arrived - the adaptations from the planet’s surface killed them.
One day, while Roxy and her friends are out, they come across a woman who is neck deep in the sand. She begs them to free her, but the other girls would rather do anything else in the world, opting to get naked and make out instead. Entranced by the woman, Roxy frees her. But it’s only after that she realizes the woman is the deadly assassin named Kate Bush (Agata Buzek), who massacres Roxy’s friends. The death of the girls rock the close-knit and insular community, who banish Roxy and her mother from After Blue until Kate Bush is dead. And so the two women travel across the hostile planet in search of the assassin. They eventually come upon Kate Bush’s home, meeting her neighbor, a woman who has built an android man and takes what she wants without remorse. She is Kate Bush by another form, and she seduces Roxy’s mother. As Roxy gets closer and closer to finding Kate, she must come to terms with the parts of her who want to have and be the wild, elusive creature that is the (aptly named) Kate Bush.
After Blue is a movie that fucks, which is not surprising. It’s explicitly sexual and sensual in ways that it often feels like only French films dare to be. It exists as this kind of perfect amalgamation of repressed emotionality and open sexuality. This notion that humanity left Earth, but decided to keep the money system, a lot of the shame about various things, and the closed-off community structure, really says a lot about how deeply ingrained those things often are in us. And it does so with strange, but moving performances from its leads. Elina Löwensohn, who plays Zora, Roxy’s mother, plays a character who loses her livelihood and community because of the actions of her daughter. She is desperate to kill Kate Bush and get back to the village, but is so lonely that she, too, is caught up in the thralls of a mad woman. Besides, Buzek feels like a caged animal set free whenever she’s on screen. Stunning in a way that is like the macabre feeling of rubbernecking at a car accident on the side of the road, it’s easy to see why Roxy digs her up and sets the story in motion.
After Blue feels like the dystopian future of Mad Max, with its deeply erratic energy, but looks like Velvet Goldmine, with its queer, glittery haze. The film is an erotic fever dream that folds in its own kind of mysticism into the science-fiction base, though it only feels like a sci-fi in very few elements, and they’re all things that could be interpreted as fantasy. The kind of genre fiction that makes the, usually quite obnoxious grouping together of the two genres, make sense for once. And that’s what’s interesting about the world of After Blue, as little details as we actually get outside of the women’s lives in this moment. It’s technically a piece of science fiction, but is it really? It’s the kind of film where the reasoning for the world’s very existence isn’t explained down to the busted science that still doesn’t make sense - it’s hand waved away and ultimately perfunctory. Because of that, the film is anything but formulaic and, while it won’t be for everyone, it was a breath of fresh air and a really interesting piece of filmmaking that I’m glad to see still exists.
