spacetime coordinates: on a distant Earth-like called After Blue planet in the far far future
directed by Bertrand Mandico (famous for Wild Boys made in 2017).
Synopsis: “In a faraway future, on a wild and untamed female inhabited planet called After Blue, a lonely teenager named Roxy (Paula Luna) unknowingly releases a mystical, dangerous, and sensual assassin from her prison. Roxy and her mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) are held accountable, banished from their community, and forced to track down the murderer named Kate Bush. Haunted by the spirits of her murdered friends, Roxy sets out on a long and strange journey across the supranatural territories of this filthy paradise. The newest vision from Bertand Mandico (The Wild Boys) plays like a lesbian El Topo (in space!) with stunning 35mm in-camera practical effects, otherworldly set pieces, and a dazzling score by Pierre Desprats.”
If there is somebody or someone who takes further the tradition of Euro-sleaze or Euro-trash tradition to new (exoplanetary) heights, then it must be Bertrand Mandico. What has been usually dismissed as a “low brow” form of European entertainment cinema under various labels of either Giallo (visually immersive and excessive Italian mystery/horror), or Euro-spy or Eurocop movie has also had a few Euro horror sci-fi gems (think Mario Bava) completely falling under what Linda Williams has called ‘body genres’ (the weepies, pornographic and horror movies). Combining softcore porn camp iconography with day-glo FX and artificial lighting (black-light or fluorescent makeup) results in a completely neo-psychedelic dirty mystical experience that has an abstruse plot and that basically screams altered states with every shot. The whole movie seems a collection of obsessions (including a Kate Bush mania that seems unrelated to the recent Stranger Things revival) – and it looks and feels more sword & sorcery than science fiction. In my mind, it has more to do with a recent neo-Ralph Bakshiesque animation – that I have been reviewing here. There is also something familiar to Andrzej Zulawski‘s Silver Globe planetary crash landing future & semi mystical science fiction (revived by Raised by the Wolves or Battlestar Galactica?) – in its insistence that the future might not be just about boys and their high tech gimmicks but also about nakedness, visions, dirt, rags and bricoleurs.
It is really a plot I could not follow (maybe because I stuck with the French original – which left me completely spell-bound and suspended in this excessive lava-lamp imagery) – and somehow was hard to take in all female witches, their obscure conflicts and the various unrealistic ham characters that seemed not only to pop out of nowhere but also be explicitly & thankfully out of tune with today’s SF canon. It all gave me a slight feeling of nausea that seems to pervade (for me) this whole cinematic Mandico experience. I somehow was not able to watch the whole movie and was drifting in and out of it, almost like I just wanted to wake up and see if I could randomly piece it together or if everything would melt down in a shimmering haze.
Finally, the slightly familiar & utterly strange exo-planetary landscapes did not just feel made-up or artificial but also touchable and an expansion of inner worlds and possibly LSD-drenched trips. They are not just green screen filming backdrops added in post-production (like the majority of today’s lavish special effects movies) by anonymous studios but hand-made spectacles of low-brow alien-made (?!) candor and uneasy (sleazy) embodiment. Maybe this is about glamour and ‘the auratic’ after effects of celebs in the age of digital (post-mechanical) reproduction (pace W Benjamin) – a bit like in Blood Machines (another recent Frenchwave SF ‘sploitation directed Raphaël Hernandez, Seth Ickerman, Savitri Joly-Gonfard which combines a lot of actual props with hand-made sets and FX), After Blue delights in simple light effects, low illusionism and practical effects reminiscent of Georges Méliès early SF (like Jules Verne inspired Trip to the Moon 1902). They are elaborate yet basic imaginary (more like dime show) sets that belie all the current high-budget CGI showoffs mega-spectacles (think Marvel blockbusters). In its literary form, I find this sensibility familiar to the one that combines seamlessly inner and outer landscapes in such recent SF works as Chris Beckett’s Beneath the World, A Sea.
TimeSpace Warps 