Bertrand Mandico made his feature debut in 2017 with The Wild Boys, a trippy coming of age story bursting with fluids, where Mandico cast five young actresses as delinquent young men who visit an island and are slowly transformed into women. There is a theme that Mandico keeps returning to, about bodies in perpetual motion and transformation, blurring gender lines until they completely dissolve and we’re left with the literal spectrum that gender exists on. After Blue (Dirty Paradise), his follow-up, returns to these ideas on gender and sexuality. A surreal, futurist sci-fi western that moves through its sparse setting like molasses, After Blue luxuriates in its glittery visual design and delights in its boundary-less sexuality, exploring the shape and form of the human body while indulging in the carnality of human instinct. Every character in After Blue is on the verge of fucking their screen partner or their environment, or themselves, at all times. We have a revolutionary with a 3rd eye in between her legs, and a humanoid robot with tentacles in place of a penis. Mandico has no real use for our traditional definitions of gender, and he especially despises the way we categorize the human experience based on something so arbitrary, and he delights in tearing down our traditional definitions.
A hypnotic adventure with a pulsating score leads us through a carnal world as it layers a story on top of an aesthetic. After Blue is purposefully alienating, rejecting traditional modes of storytelling for a more surreal ambiguity and dreamlike haze, asking questions it has no intentions of answering as Mandico guides us through his world and simply asks us to observe. Images are layered on top of one another as they dissolve in and out of other images to create a collage-like effect that can feel disorienting until it no longer does. A narrator speaks to the audience, her face transparent sometimes, invading the images on screen. From her descriptions of this adventure, we get the sense that what we’re seeing already happened.
The plot is weird, and doesn’t matter as much as the aesthetic and the vibe that Mandico is creating. Some time in the future, in another galaxy, we find ourselves on a planet that only women can survive on. A mother, Zora (Elina Löwensohn) and daughter, Roxy (Paula-Luna Breitenfelder), are sent out to find an outlaw that we see kill three young women in the opening after Roxy digs her out of the sand. This outlaw is Kate Bush, the woman with the eyes between her legs. Once the setup is out of the way, we are left to explore the wonderfully surreal landscapes of this world while running into fascinating characters.
The story might be sparse, but the way Mandico layers his visuals to create a collage of image and sound as we explore the environment with our leads feels immense, reminding us of the intense power of a movie screen. He is hypnotizing us, creating this slow, rhythmic pattern, falling in and out of dialogue as he guides us into this wonderful world of oddities. Hairy cigarettes wiggle around in the package as characters lift them to their mouths, but then the way the characters inhale and exhale the smoke is filled with the intense sensuality of a film noir. Halfway through the picture they cross paths with Sternberg (Vimala Pons), a femme fatale who maybe knows more than she’s letting on, but the way she speaks is dripping with this breathy sensuality, hooking Zora instantly. Intense colors overwhelm, as deep reds and greens and blues wash the characters in their glow, melting away the familiarity of this new world to create something that feels more alien.
For the first half of this movie, we are traversing this land with Zora and Roxy, with Roxy on horseback being guided by her mom. One shotgun between the two. These guns and weapons have names like Gucci and Chanel. Night is awash in a striking monochromatic blue, and daytime is overwhelming in its potency. We hear narration, and get used to the layered imaging. Then they arrive at this mountain, and the rest of the movie is spent here. This is where they meet Sternberg and her humanoid robot, Olgar 2 (Michaël Erpelding).
The back half of the film carries the qualities of a psychosexual drama while never getting so lost in the weeds of this dynamic that it forgets to stay loose and malleable. There is a psychosexual psychology to this section of the movie, even though Mandico keeps this languid, relaxed pace. Conversations hold different meanings and there always feels like there is something hidden under the surface that we’re just not seeing. Zora is falling into Sternberg’s seductive spell while Roxy drifts more towards Olgar 2, and Mandico never overplays his hand. Sternberg always feels suspicious the way femme fatales do, but as she traps both Zora and the audience within the rhythmic seduction of her language and her gaze, we might forget the genre tropes that are attached to her character.
The women in After Blue are given the space to explore their own sexuality, even if for some it might begin as repressed before burgeoning while we move through this landscape. Every character, at all times, has sex on their minds, with hands that are constantly drifting towards the crotch. The environment and the aesthetic feels like it is on the verge of bursting from its own pleasure. Even though there is very little actual sex taking place, Mandico uses sex as a general aesthetic concept, taking us on an odyssey of perversion, while dissolving our traditional ideas on gender to create an experience that feels overwhelming once you give yourself over to the it. After Blue has a plot, but it doesn’t care about plot. It is a sensorial experience that digs into our subconscious and plays with our own sense of perversion.
