The apartment door is open, Paula Luna puts on a fair, laughing head. The living room with a view of the Sacré-Coeur has been transformed into a photo studio, the time to immortalize the young German actress in her white dress, all embroidered, as women wore in the past. Then she leaves to change, comes back in jeans and a T-shirt, serves tea with cookies she has baked, shows the three-room apartment she shares in a roommate. Monday, December 13, around 3 p.m., Paula Luna gave her very first interview. 21 years old, she holds the main role in After Blue (Dirty Paradise), the second feature film by Bertrand Mandico, which will be released in theaters on Wednesday February 16.
She has aquamarine eyes, platinum hair and an infectious laugh. But the moon can turn: on the photos it posts on Instagram, she looks hostile, her gaze falling on the lens. Paula Luna carries with her something rock, she could come from the 1980s, be called Blondie or Kim Gordon. In After Blue (Dirty Paradise), Bertrand Mandico chose to name it Roxy, like Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry’s group. The director of Wild boys (2017), magician of the image who shoots on film and creates its special effects, was looking for a magnetic girl who is out of time.
Because After Blue (Dirty Paradise) takes his characters to another planet, the Earth having become unlivable. Roxy, a lonely young girl, embarks with her mother – the sublime Elina Löwensohn – on a vengeful journey. The feverish world of science fiction contaminates the wide open spaces of a feminine, erotic western (with Vimala Pons, Agata Buzek…), the men not having survived in these toxic tropics. “Shooting with Bertrand was like being a prisoner in a storybook: there was everything, the landscape, the sets he had created. We merged, each helped the other… I have a lot of things in common with Roxy, for example the fact that she feels a little alien ”, she said with a hint of German accent..
Good encounters
How many actresses would dream of working with Mandico? Paula Luna, who had never taken a theater course when she arrived in Paris in 2019, caught the attention of the filmmaker of the strange, trained at the Gobelins animation school. “I met her during a casting, for a series of clips for the M83 group. We did some crazy, incongruous tests; she was 200% in it and didn’t speak a word of French. Three or four months later, I saw her again for After Blue and it was obvious: she was Roxy. It is as if it has always existed, it comes from the past and it is modern. She’s a heroine ”, emphasizes Bertrand Mandico.
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