Fantastic Film Fest 2022 Review - After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
Images courtesy of Fantastic Film Festival Australia.
Singularly strange and perturbed to a fault, Bertrand Mandico's After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is a throwback to the home video heyday of the 80s, an acid-laced lesbian sci-fi/fantasy/western about a planet where only women can survive. The atmosphere is a pink haze, the guns are Gucci-branded, and everything is dripping in sweat, saliva and/or slime.
We follow Roxy (also known as Toxic), and her mother, Zora, as they hunt down the deadly killer known as Katerina Bushowsky (who is referred to as Kate Bush). Across the titular planet of After Blue, they meet other strange women, each of whom have adapted to life in this inhospitable wasteland in their own way, and a blind, tentacled, male "Louis Vuitton" model of android, who goes by the name of Olgar-2. Nearly every interaction has an air of titillation to it; nudity is just casual dress, and personal space is a foreign concept.
In line with the nouveau-80s-chic aesthetic, costumes are the love children of the tackiest corners of an op-shop and incense store rugs, and sets resemble the inside of a sea monkey tank. Faces are doused with cheap glitter, and I get the sense that actors came away from the set having inhaled more microplastics than most people do in their entire lives. In this strange, surreal, dreamy landscape, Mandico spares no expense making the production design look as cheap and glitzy as possible, the result looking as though it was made with magic sand, silly putty and Barbie-branded nail polish.
The characters of After Blue are hard to get a read on beyond their eccentricities, and the narrative is woefully bare-boned considering the film's 130-minute runtime, rendering the whole affair a bit too alien. It's clear that the focus is on indulging in the bizarre and hedonistic, but without much in the way of a point to the story, it ends up rather tiresome and confusing in perhaps a few too many places.
All in all, After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is a wild and weird dreamscape of a film, complete with glowing crystals, high fashion accessories, and no less than 25 mentions of the words “Kate Bush”. It does exactly what one would expect from the trailer and poster, but its runtime feels like a disservice, and as a result, seems best suited to playing on the walls of some exotic nightclub.
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After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is showing at the 2022 Fantastic Film Festival Australia, running 21st April to the 6th of May. For tickets to the festival and more info, click here.