A voice introduces us to the future: “You are in space,” it says, “...the Earth was sick and rotten.” Bertrand Mandico’s second feature, the comedy-western-fantasy After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is named after a post-Earth home to humanity. This other planet, After Blue, located in another solar system, offers anyone with ovaries—anyone without them dies choked by their own hairs—the hope of a redemption. “If everything is to be done, nothing is to be done again,” declares a sign in the natural wilderness: strict and arbitrary rules are established to “strike the evil at its roots,” as one of the surviving women state. At best phantasmagorical, the dream of a humanity free of evil—through its systematic eradication of one gender—produces distortions where community becomes authoritarian, and purification, commanded.
One day on an excursion outside her community, Roxy (Paola Luna) discovers buried in the sand a female creature named Kate Bush (Agata Buzek)—half genie in a lamp, half bewitching criminal—and sets her free. Revealing the darkest desires and the most troubled thoughts, Kate Bush seeks to create chaos on the planet, while paradoxically suggesting, at the cost of seismic violence, a possible reconciliation of the human being with a form of bestiality. The reigning community of women seek to eradicate this wild agent and punish Roxy and her mother, Zora (Elina Löwensohn), for their mistake in freeing her by assigning them to find Kate Bush’s hideout and kill the fugitive.
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is above all the site of a delightful hybrid where color-saturated images, music (by Pierre Desprats), sculptural sets, skins, and colors are superimposed to imbricate a fascinating strangeness: the director's signature. If the story—despite its darkness—avoids the trap of moralizing, it is partly thanks to the intermingling of genres and the changes of registers—whose dosage, sometimes disconcerting, proves sufficiently precise to invite, without heaviness, a reflection on the functioning of our society. Mandico’s follow-up to his debut, The Wild Boys (2017), is a cosmic mille feuille with neon icing, deliciously indigestible.
Because it escapes any attempt at assignment, this film is worthy of attention: through the effects produced, namely the maintenance of constant oppositions—oppositions announced by the second title itself ("Dirty Paradise")—it manages to raise very current questions about gender and its representation in cinema, as well as for the conquest of space, notably through the ambivalent view of the human condition. If the notion of transgression remains unanswered—here between fantasy and fictional materialization—the love of a unique aesthetic—a mixture of brilliant bricolage and special effects realized at the time of the shooting without any editing in post-production—is striking. The universe straight out of the director's imagination gives birth to a space-time that constantly oscillates from one genre to another, from one era to another, thus offering the possibility of a sensuous ride in the phantasmagorical and decadent future of humanity.
Certainly one of the most singular premieres of the 74th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, After Blue (Dirty Paradise) was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize of the International Critics and deserves to be praised for its interdisciplinary richness and poetry. On the shores of Locarno’s Lake Maggiore, Bertrand Mandico discussed his latest film, of course, but also writing, feminism and mutations.
NOTEBOOK: Your use of irony—or is it cynicism?—in the film certainly allows you to create humor. Can the fantastic world also be seen as a criticism addressed to society? For example, the idea that the guns used by the women are all named after haute couture brands.
BERTRAND MANDICO: Irony, yes, but certainly not cynicism. That's a character trait that horrifies me. It's a dark, gritty comedy and at the same time the film contains several film genres. I assume the melodramatic side. It's the consumer society. The brands chosen mark the collective unconscious. This choice is very ironic: brands can adapt to the market, and as there is perhaps no longer a market for clothing on After Blue, weapons would be made like jewelry. It was interesting to attack the big brands, here without aggression, nonetheless with a certain amount of criticism. This is the flaw in our profession: many filmmakers make pacts with the big brands, get funded by Yves Saint Laurent to talk about feminism. On After Blue, it's the residue of consumer society. The names still resonate, but there has been a mutation.
NOTEBOOK: This idea of “a mutation” seems particularly interesting nowadays. How does it echo with your cinema? Do you also wish to create new forms ?
MANDICO: Mutations—living things mutate all the time, we have gone from being fishes to lizards, and we continue to mutate. And these are mutations that will last, to give us pleasure, but also new sensations. I imagine a spectrum of possibilities: the human body changes and will continue to evolve to go who knows where. And since the human being is part of nature, and by seeing the diversity of forms, the diversity of bodies, the diversity of behaviors in the animal and plant world, I transpose and play with nature.
NOTEBOOK: The last sentence spoken in your first film, The Wild Boys, is “Le futur est femme, le futur est sorcière” (the future is woman, the future is witch), and After Blue follows this idea. The proposal of a world in which bodies—all bodies—transform in order to annihilate violence. How did you try to achieve this annihilation and how is this reflected in the choice of characters?
MANDICO: By creating a mutant. It's tricky because it can be kitschy. My relationship with actresses and the questioning of the “feminine” being increasingly strong, I reversed the characters in the initial script—there were only men and one woman—but I kept the texts. I didn't feminize the characters even though the cast was entirely female, which allowed me to have a non-stereotyped writing style. This is also what I'm wondering about: what role to offer actresses? How to break the stereotypes?
NOTEBOOK: How did you get from the Western genre to this very diverse artistic proposal?
MANDICO: I first imagined children—four boys—who would find a head on a beach, thinking it is a severed head, when in fact the head would belong to a living person. The sandy person would reward the child and punish the others. The Thousand and One Nights inspiration would therefore lead to the idea of “granting three wishes.” And that was it: a Western. This project has had several lives: I started to get money and a cast, but I had to abandon it for production reasons and moved on. When I finished The Wild Boys, I thought about that Western again. I recycle a lot, I don't like to throw things away. There is a material that moves me a lot. In the end, the very idea of the Western was not convincing: the neo-Western doesn’t interest me and the Italians have done everything. If I appropriate it, it's by moving the Western to the side of heroic fantasy.
NOTEBOOK: I was delighted by the attention and care given to dialogue, which gives a unique melody to your story—some sort of a poetic New Wave of 2021. This is a dimension that I feel is too often neglected in films, as if images, music and rhythm were enough. What is your relationship to language and more specifically to writing?
MANDICO: I twist my texts, I turn them over like a sock, I mistreat them, I go looking for a genre that I hadn't thought of or that will put me off. That's how I manage to build my cinema: by mistreating my ideas. I really start with the text, the images come later: my scripts are structured by dialogue and situations. I'm very, very manic: you can't change a line or a word. What the actresses say is what was written. There is no room for improvisation. Improvisation, if there is any, is physical. The basis, the initial score is the text and the dialogues: no realism, but a stylization. This aspect also conditions the casting research: these are texts that are not easy to say, they have to be tamed. It's interesting: my relationship to the dialogues is highly musical. Three of the main actresses have accents, they are not French. I like these accents, I like the way they say the text and make it their own, applying themselves to saying it while mistreating it a little.
For instance, Paola Luna was not at all predestined for film or acting. We spotted her on Instagram; we did some tests, she was great. She was Roxy as I imagined her. She already had everything: the peroxide hair, the haircut, the body, her acting was right. But she didn't speak a word of French. Three months later I called her back thinking of post-synchronizing her with someone else for the voice, she came back and she spoke French. So we worked together! She had a way of understanding her character that I thought was great. She was incredible! At the moment there is a drift in French acting: many young French actresses, in order to be realistic or naturalistic—because they are asked to—get rid of the text and say it as quickly as possible. They spit it out. That's not the music I'm looking for. I struggle to tell them to take their time. I'm very attached to the musicality and sound of the words and what the words say.
NOTEBOOK: It is said that reading is quite essential to writing. What does your library look like?
MANDICO: My library is like an extremely bulky library, taking up more and more space. I have ex-libraries sleeping in ex-apartments. It's a spreading creature and I have the unfortunate tendency to buy different editions of a text that I love in order to read the different translations. I adore The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G.Ballard—I bought all the French and English versions! There are obsessions, noble and not so noble culture, subculture, underground that coexists with the classics, books on painting, books on cinema, writings of filmmakers: it's all this that feeds me.
NOTEBOOK: In your film is this phrase, “Everything is to be done, nothing is to be done again.” Is this true with cinema as well?
MANDICO: I think that everything can be done and redone and redone. You mustn't have amnesia when you make films. You have to pretend that you don't know the past.