After Blue (2021) User Reviews

Compulsive, clever, funny and gross

[warlikerobertson · 6/10 · 8 January 2024]

From the moment a "fifth element" blond naive girl meets a buried to the neck, snarling, naked medusa whom she releases and murders the naked "Heathers" I was appalled, hooked, repulsed, turned on, laughed, tensed up, grossed out and finally thoroughly, thoroughly confused. I loved it and it will play on repeat on my video enabled gravestone.

Watch this if you like your "Barbarella" with added psychedelics, plenty of goo hanging from bushes, tentacled-penis endowed Androids and ball-bearing lactation. The fact that there are hats that reminded me of a mad Aunt I knew didn't help me take it seriously. And as for the kiddie-prop guns named after fashion houses, take that NRA!

Just Bonkers

[derek-duerden · 7/10 · 16 November 2022]

In principle, I am very fond of films that don't look or behave like other films. On that basis, this film scores very highly indeed.

Lots of inventiveness in the scene-setting, lights and costumes disguise what was probably a fairly limited budget but (like the films of Anna Biller) this carries through into a singular vision. The plot could have been a bit more substantial perhaps, but the increasingly frequent mentions of "Kate Bush" (officially Katarzyna Buszowska) are very entertaining - and I wondered whether the cast had trouble keeping straight faces having to say that all the time...?

In any case, if you make it through to the end, there is some sort of resolution to the quest that had me in mind of the great "Singing Ringing Tree", in that I really didn't ask too many questions, just went along for the ride - just like I did 55 years ago with the latter...

Recommended, if you like that sort of thing.

Barbarella in the Bush of Ghosts

[frukuk · 3/10 · 27 August 2023]

So strange that this film names a character after the musician, Kate Bush. It's hard to stay immersed in the film, when every mention of the character makes you think of the musician with the same name. It's so jarring.

This film does feel like it has been influenced to some extent by the film, Barbarella (1968). In that film, the character Durand-Durand (sic) inspired the band name of Duran Duran. So perhaps "Kate Bush" is used as the name of a character in this film, to provide some sort of symmetry?

To the extent that there is a story here ("unearthing some old Kate Bush"), perhaps the moral of the story is that all vinyl fans should play Kate Bush's A side and then turn her over and play her B side?

... no. Just. No.

[Alex-M_ · 1/10 · 14 October 2021]

So I watched 20mins wanted to leave after 3..... I wanted to give it at least 30 mins, but it became clear it wouldn't get any better before then.

From what I saw, this is a movie done by someone who just wanted to film a soft erotic fantasy with all women.

Don't run to watch it thinking it'll be sexy... It seriously isn't.

Character's personality and acting were not needed for the director's objective. No idea about plot. I yeeted myself when I noticed that not even the acting would be salvageable.

It's intended to honour 80ies movies. But it's 2021 now and I like to think we've made some progress since then. If I want to see an 80ies movie. I'll watch one made in the 80ies, and enjoy it for what it is.

This? It's a hard pass for me.

Love it!

[bart-vanderstraeten · 8/10 · 18 October 2021]

It's kitch, we know. But the photography is exquisite, the music score is solid, and the acting is convincing. The plot gets a bit confusing in the last 30 mins, some events are not very clear, but overall it's a hell of a trip. Recommended if you're into B movies.

Fever sexy dream limnal hypnogogic masterpiece

[tritisan · 9/10 · 6 January 2022]

After Blue (Dirty Paradise) has been described as the best lesbian acid Western ever made. This is unquestionably true.

Most folks expect films to make sense and follow certain conventions. This one does not. It defies most categories---expect maybe "art house".

Watch it after consuming your substance of choice before entering this realm.

Watch it while making love to someone you may or may not love.

DON'T THINK ABOUT IT. Just relax and let the miasma wash over you.

And most of all, keep asking yourself, "Have I killed Kate Bush yet?"

"J'ai Tue Kate Bush"

[richardchatten · 8/10 · 30 July 2023]

In one of his films Woody Allen awoke in a panic gasping "No more Polish women!". He could have had this film - awash with strong Slavic faces - in mind, although the copious quantities of tobacco the sinister coven in wide-brimmed black hats consume betrays it's gallic origins.

It posits that time-honoured fantasy of a future in which only women survive and with the shackles of patriarchy thrown off inevitably turn upon each other.

Awash with hot girl-on-girl action, Freudian symbols like a horse draped in a veil, carnivorous caterpillars, women with hairy arms lasciviously handling guns and lines like "Would you like some purple soup?" it's all so earnest you suspect a leg-pull, and a wanted poster bearing the name 'Kate Bush' certainly indicates that someone's tongue was in their cheek.

Either you love it or you hate it..

[jochen-j-smet · 10/10 · 31 January 2024]

OK, this movie shouldn't be watched like a 'normal' movie. It should simply be watched for what it is, namely a piece of art. The scenario, who gives a damn. In most movies I do give a damn, but not in this one. Bertrand Mandico makes it quite clear you shouldn't. I read in another review that one should just let him/herself be immersed in the strange and wondrous universe created by this movie. That hits the nail.

It's a visual masterpiece, full of colours and art. The weirdness of the encounters just makes you laugh. I definitely need to rewatch this on acid.

I especially love the western kind of feeling to it.

This is truly something, instant cult!

Purple soup, anyone?

[ConvitHouse · 8/10 · 28 April 2024]

On a planet in a distant galaxy, colonized by women when the Earth got sick, Roxy (aka Toxic), rescues Katarzyna Buszowska (aka Kate Bush), who has been buried up to her neck in sand to await death by the incoming tide. Roxy's merciful act unleashes a tide of misfortune on her friends, as Kate Bush turns out to be a killer. The village's coven of elders therefore order Roxy (Paula-Luna Breitenfelder) and her hairdresser mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) to pursue and kill Kate Bush, a task that takes them into sci-fi western territory, as they ride off with designer weapons on an amateurish bounty hunt that turns out to be a sexual and spiritual odyssey for them both.

Nothing could have prepared them, or the viewer, for what they encounter as they travel inland - hallucinogenic caterpillars, giant fungi, monstrous creatures of various sorts, and a pretentious artist called Sternberg (Vimala Pons) with her male android partner. Director Bertrand Mandico overwhelms the viewer with a torrent of bizarre imaginings - the lesbian jacuzzi session that takes place in the entrails of a recently deceased antediluvian creature isn't the half of it.

The living planet with its sexualized flora is a field day for Freudians, and the film is obviously saying something about female liberation from the patriarchy, though exactly what is anyone's guess. Is it indeed a dirty paradise, or a world just as violent as the male-dominated Earth was? This is a true work of surrealism, from which you can take any message you can find, or none. Kate Bush has a third eye (no spoilers here, but it's not in her forehead) and we are invited to have our own spiritual awakening, not though being preached at, but by allowing this seductive stream of weirdness to float us out of normality.

Although the film never runs out of ideas, I found the two hours plus running time overlong. The plot is confusing, though arguably that's the point of it. If you want something different, After Blue certainly delivers: it's so bonkers it's beyond good or bad, and it is difficult to think of another film like this one. Perhaps if Tarkovsky had directed Barbarella it would have been something like this.

10 stars for Surrealism!! Up there with Inland Empire!

[aob_brctor87 · 10/10 · 3 January 2024]

I have no Idea how to rate this film so I'm rating it 10 for being absolutely relentlessly surreal.

I ran across this on Shudder and loved the plot description of a planet where only women can survive tied into a mother and daughter somehow being forced to hunt a vicious killer across dreamlike landscapes.

I was not prepared for a film so bizarre and fascinating in its surrealism. I can't stress enough how weird/ surreal this film is. David Lynch's Inland Empire is the only other film I've seen this insane.

However the films styles are totally different. Empire is a dark, dark film. After Blue has an almost "Dark Crystal" or "The Never Ending Story" vibe going for it (If they were rated NC-17 that is)

It opens with the setup for a plot. A group of ladies find a woman buried up to her head in sand...and start to murder her except a girl named Roxy (who goes by toxic) has mercy and digs her out. Oh and her name is Kate Bush lol.

Kate Bush is spares Roxy but murders the heck out of the other women running naked on the beach.

That's how the film starts out, and I truly doubt anyone, including the director can write a thesis on it or knows what its about.

It's not meant to be understood but experienced.

It has a lot of humor as well. For instance Roxy throughout the film masturbates A LOT (as do other characters) even once with a gun she finds in the river.

I was cracking up watching the whole time at the weirdness/randomness and everything else. With Superimposing trippy visuals and multiple characters appearing on screen all at once.

Possibly in different realities. Possibly there is only one person in the film who ate 1000 mushrooms and can't stop compulsively masturbating in a nightmare fairy land of angels and demons.

TLDR: If you love Surreal films that do not require a linear plot (or one at all) and style over substance-except there is plenty of substance- just good luck figuring out what it is

I also find it noteworthy that Roxy's mom has her own "moment" shes navigating a tunnel from a H. P Lovecraft story- terrified and shaking--she does the only thing she can do.

Drop everything folks, its masturbation time!