After Blue (Dirty Paradise): a blatantly bonkers bit of business

“Je m’appelle Kate,” drawls a psychic, sensuous space-witch (Agata Buzek) discovered buried up to her neck on an alien beach of acid orange, purple and black by a group of young women in between bouts of skinny-dipping and slaughter. “Kate Bush.” Like most of After Blue (Dirty Paradise), it’s a blatantly bonkers bit of business delivered with a straight face. On-the-nose pop-culture references are framed by self-consciously outré production design within what feels like a sincerely psychedelic saga of social struggle and self-discovery; broad mythic storytelling and heightened emotional stakes are mobilised, twentieth-century modes of exploitation genre and experimental cinema are fondly pastiched, but the film struggles to quicken the pulse.

Writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s first feature, The Wild Boys (2017), saw five adolescents shipped off to a desert island in the early 20^th century; After Blue, his follow-up, is set in the far future, where women live without men on a planet named After Blue, humanity having fled an unliveable earth only to discover that those without ovaries now suffer unsurvivable internal hair growth. This brave new world has fostered a kind of lo-fi gyno-fascism, with hints of an anti-scientific micro-nationalist eugenics underpinning a life of conformist pleasure-seeking, opposition to nomadism and alternative lifestyles, and the ostracisation or eradication of “bad seeds”. Roxy (Paula Luna) is a young outsider whose impulsive decision to liberate the witch Kate Bush from her sandy constraints puts her at odds with community elders. Following this, Roxy and her mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn), the village hairdresser, are charged with catching and killing Kate Bush, entailing a perilous journey through the planet’s surreal deserts and forests and the uncovering of hidden truths about the world and their place in it.

After Blue is distinguished by its extraordinary aesthetic sensibility, which rings with echoes of all kinds of other works while remaining bizarrely distinctive. From its opening titles, it boldly evokes the production design of grindhouse and VHS films, its fantasy effects achieved through in-camera and pre-digital technologies. Sets and costumes are ingeniously handmade, combining fake fur and glamorous talons, plasma balls and quartz crystals, chicken-wire and neon tubes; locations feel like either rickety studio stages or starkly gorgeous natural locations; special effects lean on gloopy exposed organs and rubber tentacles, blacklight colour palettes and video filters and effects. The world feels consistent and weird, all stardust and mulch, topless warriors and telepathic horses, cannibal kisses and bioluminescent shrubs, New Age androids and caterpillar-cigars.

Like recent filmmakers such as Prano Bailey-Bond, Anna Biller and Peter Strickland, Mandico seems invested in a sincere excavation of genres held up for ridicule or scaremongering in twentieth-century moral panics. Many science fiction, horror, spaghetti Western and psychedelic titles come to mind here, including Barbarella (1968) with its sexy alien vistas, El Topo (1970) with its cosmic frontier mindscapes, and Blade Runner (1982) with its neo-noir genre-twisting. The 1980 music video for David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ also looms large; Pierre Desprat’s synth-heavy score enhances the film’s retro vibe. Moves toward self-contained alternate reality are qualified, however, by oddly specific contemporary cultural references, both grave (racism against specific existing nationalities) and bizarro (Gucci laser guns and Louis Vuitton robots).

This distinctive sensibility is put to the service of a story that follows the picaresque trajectory of a hero’s journey of exploration and discovery; it’s a little like a quasi-feminist Apocalypse Now, with Roxy’s Willard in search of Kate Bush’s Kurtz via dreamlike encounters with bandits, bohemians and bounty hunters. The combination of woozy tone and stylised but rudimentary characterisation makes for significant challenges around narrative engagement, as does the lengthy running time. Yet intriguing strands emerge. In the shifting mother-daughter dynamic between Roxy and Zora, Luna and Löwensohn convey a strong yet testy bond befitting a duo who rely on each other in opposition to social conformity while experiencing familiar generational friction; the daughter is seen to be wiser in some ways, the mother no less open to experiment. Other themes include a sustained interest in hair and hairdressing, with various scenes of shaving and proposed mythic links between hair growth and kinds of evolution or extinction. The Western genre looms large too, through horses, hats, six-shooters and questionably racialised sidekicks. It’s a melange of spaceships, haircare and cowboys, framed as an escapist, eroticised mood piece in which cultural references meet lightly drawn, quixotically motivated characters. The result has the feel of a playground storytelling adventure game, leaving us at the whim of a bold, ingenious, somewhat childlike imagination.

► After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is in UK cinemas now.