‘After Blue’ is the Hair-Elevating Sci-Fi Acid Western of your Desires

A melange of glitter, spores, and sand swirls alongside the coast. A gaggle of younger ladies carrying wool hairshirts picks their method by the tan stalagmites that dot the seashore. The downcast face of one among their quantity spots one thing within the dunes. A rotting head — or so it could appear — adorned with a crown of seaweed. The women attempt to take away the top, however because it blinks skyward. There’s an entire physique below there.

Whereas the others abandon the thriller to frolic within the waves, Roxy (Paula Luna) hangs again, enchanted by the piercing blue eyes gazing up at her. The lady (Agata Buzek), says she’ll grant three needs if Roxy frees her. A jinn’s promise. What may presumably go fallacious? Roxy begins to dig, and Katarzyna Buszowska emerges, alias: Kate Bush. Roxy doesn’t understand it but, however she has freed the boogeyman: a murderess condemned to be swallowed by the ocean. Because the blood of Roxy’s mates mingles with the lapping seafoam, she sits in shock: what has she accomplished?

From its inciting incident, After Blue (Soiled Paradise) is upfront and unapologetic about its polymorphous method to style. It is a Queer-Sci-fi-Fantasy-Acid-Western. Whereas that string of phrases may smack of phrase salad, it’s to writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s credit score that every one the puzzle items match collectively so naturally. Eco-feminism, frontier myth-making, lesbian need, and psychedelia are worthy bedfellows, it seems.

After Blue takes place within the wake of an unspecified local weather disaster. By some coincidence, we’ve discovered a brand new house: After Blue, a bluntly-named alternative for the water-logged planet we took as a right. Within the movie’s manufacturing notes, Mandico clarifies that the movie’s subtitle — (Soiled Paradise) — just isn’t a judgment on the wildness of After Blue however a stark inevitability of colonialism. Human beings generally tend to doom unsullied land with our very presence, nevertheless well-intentioned. And the residents of After Blue are attempting, as greatest they’ll, to keep away from humanity’s previous errors. There is no such thing as a globalization or expertise. They lower any trace of evil out on the root. Oh, proper, and there are not any males. Let me clarify:

When humanity arrived on After Blue, it encountered a germ within the planet’s ambiance that proved lethal to these assigned male at delivery. Solely AFAB of us are able to co-existing with the virus’ unusual capacity to speed up rogue hair progress. And so, on this intergalactic frontier with a strictly female edge, Roxy and her mom, Zora (Elina Löwensohn), turn into exiles. They might return on one situation: with the lifeless corpse of Kate Bush.

The glue holding After Blue’s numerous items in place is that it’s, finally, a coming-of-age story. Roxy should work out who she is, what she desires, and who she desires on this harmful and exquisite world. Newcomer Paula Luna endows the bleached-blonde teen with a reckless curiosity and an earnestness that each will get her in bother, alienates her from her mom, and finally permits her to carve out her personal area on After Blue. She smokes writhing silkworms below the floorboards. She finds herself concurrently terrified and mesmerized by the lady she’s been tasked with killing. And she or he even falls in love with an android (Michaël Erpelding) possessing tendril-like genitalia, the closest factor she’s come to seeing a “real-life” man.

For those who swoon over in-camera optical results and enthusiastically tactile mise-en-scene, After Blue’s two-hour runtime will wiz proper by. Visually, Mandico and firm have cross-pollinated the dreamy cinematic fantasies of Jean Cocteau, the anachronistic eye of Man Maddin, and a sprinkling of the fleshy abandon of Fellini’s Satyricon. Shot in 35mm and devoid of CGI, After Blue is the sort of movie you possibly can attain out and contact; plentiful like a field of mould and pulsing with subterranean gasoline pockets and untold quantities of slime. For its half, Pierre Desprats‘ sultry, alien rating is a marvel to behold. In some way this man put disco and Ennio Morricone twangs in a blender, and we’ll be eternally in his debt.

After Blue is keenly (and profitable) in aligning itself with the Western-Noir custom of questioning, rejecting, and in any other case subverting the Conventional Western’s obsession with frontier justice and lone heroism. Each Zora and Roxy are vocal pacifists who’ve little interest in their village’s quest for vengeance. They’ll barely shoot straight, not to mention wrap their heads round taking a life. It’s refreshing on this age of “all the things is a Western” to see a movie that has each accomplished its homework (Warren Beatty’s fur coat from McCabe & Mrs. Miller would swimsuit Zora effectively) whereas additionally making an effort to carry one thing new to the desk (a.okay.a. sapphic, intergalactic El Topo).

Confession: after I first noticed After Blue method again in TIFF’s 2021 Midnight Insanity block, one thing in regards to the setup’s organic method to intercourse set off my (“wait, is that this gender important?” alarm). Finally After Blue‘s enthusiasm for defying binaries ought to guarantee us that that’s not what’s occurring. (It’s price noting that the movie options the non-binary artist Franky Gogo. Besides: Mandico addressed the matter straight in Xtra Journal, calling organic determinism “an abhorrent idea that turns my abdomen.” Hopefully, that clears all the things up).

After Blue (Soiled Paradise) is completely not a movie for everybody. Its cultural interlocutors are huge (Barbarella and Orpheus? In this financial system?). And the movie’s pitiless embrace of the sexual, the sensual, and past (!) can be a barrier for many. That stated, freaks rejoice: this can be a gem you’re not going to wish to miss.

After Blue (Soiled Paradise) is now obtainable on VOD through AppleTV, Amazon, GooglePlay, Vudu, and Vimeo in North America.

Associated Subjects: LGBTQ, Science Fiction, Westerns

Meg Shields is the common-or-garden farm boy of your desires and a senior contributor at Movie Faculty Rejects. She at the moment runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She can be a curator for One Excellent Shot and a contract author for rent. Meg will be discovered screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter right here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).