THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE
We left Earth, leaving our habits in the locker room, for a film-loving journey in orbit and in gold. The journey to the moon has already been done, a long time ago (Méliès, 1902); here we are one hundred and twenty years later on After Blue (Dirty Paradise), a orange-pink planet populated by women, springing from the imagination of Bertrand Mandico, icon of surrealist cinema produced by Emmanuel Chaumet (Ecce Films). Méliès’ rocket pierced the grimacing Moon’s right eye; Mandico the magician invents a most erotic third eye.
Coming from the animation (trained at the Parisian school of Gobelins), also designer, Mandico, aged fifty, officiates for twenty years behind the camera, producing his special effects during filming, post-synchronizing the actresses to better dialogue with them during shots. Author of around thirty short and medium-length films (Our Lady of Hormones, ultra pulp…) and a first “long”, The Wild Boys (Louis-Delluc Prize in 2018), the director writes and directs his films tinged with magical realism, at the crossroads of multiple references, Jean Cocteau of course, but also the Canadian Guy Maddin, the Japanese Toshio Matsumoto, the Polish Walerian Borowczyk, etc. . – Mandico pays homage to the latter in Boro in the Box (2011). Mandico succeeds with After Blue a rare mix of adventure film and well cracked auteur film, with special effects made without a green screen. The Max Linder Panorama was not mistaken: the mythical Parisian room on the Grands Boulevards welcomes the UFO for at least two weeks – in current times, the beginning of eternity.
Mandico often says he would have liked to be an actress – who knows, one day, he says. His movies don’t come from Mars or Venus (masculine vs. feminine, to use the cliché): neither blue nor pink, Mandico’s work takes cinema to ultraviolet light, mixing genres of narration, playing with the codes of pop culture, chasing from the frame everything that to reality. If the filmmaker has fun like crazy and runs on self-mockery, his stories are nonetheless full of meaning, revisiting the way we look at bodies, questioning the constantly renewed barbarism, violence calling for violence, etc.
Pop culture and hairy bodies
Feminine Western, fantastic, feverish and sensual, After Blue… recounts, implicitly, the fantasy of a society that would like to start all over again from scratch. The Earth having become uninhabitable, humans left to settle on a new star, with the idea of eradicating the evil at the root, never to give it time to settle. But the men did not survive in this atmosphere, suffocated by the hairs that grew inside them. Only the women remain, whose hair on the contrary is externalized and forms a fluffy scarf at the level of the neck, arms, chest… In AfterBlue, a veritable “planet of breasts”, the nudity of hairy bodies takes on an animal turn, sexuality mutates right down to ejaculatory breasts.
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