For Sight & Sound’s November 2022 issue, I reviewed Bertrand Mandico’s feature After Blue (Dirty Paradise). The review begins:
“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…
