A sapphic sci-fi fantasy with a colour palette of frazzled neons, featuring a character with an all-seeing vagina eye and androids equipped with genital tentacles, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), Bertrand Mandico’s Day-Glo kitsch erotic odyssey is certainly a singular vision. On paper, the tale of a teenager on an all-female planet, banished with her mother to hunt down the outlaw she inadvertently freed from imprisonment, sounds like a wigged-out and wacky good time. In reality, though, it’s an overlong, indulgent slog.
Paula Luna stars as Roxy (or Toxic, as the mean girls prefer to call her), a bleach-blond waif in a permanent state of semi-arousal. Elina Löwensohn plays her mother, the village hairdresser whose main job seems to be shaving the excess hair from the women’s necks (something to do with a quirk of the planetary atmosphere). The production design goes heavy on glitter, crystals and slime, but can’t obscure the fact that the film has little of interest to say.
