With its dirty glam sheen, bright chunks of color floating in filth, and an odor you can feel wafting off the screen, _After Blue_ is all about making vomit cool again. >To be incoherent means to have faith in cinema, it means to have a romantic approach, unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike, cinegenic, an epic narration. -Writer / Director Bertrand Mandico in his Incoherence Manifesto (2012) _After Blue_ is a surreal road trip where, if you aren't sure you're going to like it before you see it, then you're going to hate it. Fortunately, I knew I was going to like it because I'm a big fan of Bertrand Mandico after seeing his _The Wild Boys_ (2017). As someone who sees a movie everyday, a filmmaker who goes all out, who commits 100% to the bit and turns the style up to 11, makes the kind of movies I want to see because they're going to stand far out from the dump of rom-coms and family dramas that litter the cinema every week. Look, let's be honest, you're not going to like _After Blue_ so I can't recommend seeing it. It's just too weird. But if you want to watch a technicolor burp spew across the screen, if you like movies with a trippy 70's vibe, if you're into Ken Russell pompous extravagance then you might like _After Blue_ but don't blame me if you don't. (Mini-rant you don't need to read: Honestly, I don't get the criticisms saying _After Blue_ is 'unintelligible' . Hell, I can tell you what it's about and I'm not even a native French speaker! In a post-apocalyptic world, a young woman (Roxy, or 'Toxic' to the people of the village) finds a woman buried up to her neck in the ground. Roxy helps the woman out of the sand, only to learn this woman (Kate(rina) Bush(owsky)) was buried there to be executed when the tide rose. 'Kate Bush' gives her three wishes, but the women of the village tell Roxy and her mother that they have to go on a road trip, find Kate and kill her. Yes, it's a surreal film, but those who say there isn't a story either didn't pay attention or they wrote a review based only on other critics' articles because they didn't see the film themselves.)

Arty as fuck retro futuristic post-apocalyptic sexy campy queer space acid western. Very pretty and surprisingly compelling. I'm familiar with some shorter movies by Bertrand Mandico and I was sceptical this hard aesthetic ride would work full length - but I'm positively and very pleasantly surprised. And Elina Löwensohn is a treat every time. I wish I did drugs because this would be a good movie for doing them.

[AtlàntidaFF '22] This planet inhabited by naked women with a sexual appetite could be a director's erotic fantasy, but it becomes a kitsch representation of a dehumanized matriarchy. There is no feminized behavior, but rather a less sexualized idea of the characters has been sought, marked by an eighties and craft aesthetic. But although he flees from moralizing, he does not find his own path beyond a certain retro visualization that has more personality in form than in substance.