Bertrand Mandico's After Blue was a slight disappointment to me. The psychedelic splendor of the more successful The Wild Boys remains, but I'm not sure if Mandico's talents are suited to the mock epic demands of his heroine's journey. If you are going to play material like this straight, not something Mandico is inclined to do. characterization cannot be limited to deadpan monologues and ambivalent gestures. If, however, a burlesque is being enacted, Mandico's wheelhouse, more overt humor is needed to leaven the exposition.
After Blue does have a few chuckles, particularly the vulvic third eye. If Mandico's schizoid films were to be pigeonholed into a genre, the midnight movie one would be the most appropriate filing. Certainly, the pictures of Jodorowsky, John Waters, Lucio Fulci, and Guy Maddin seem to have left their traces in his films. However, After Blue is an almost chivalric tale of good and evil at odds with Mandico's amorphous androgyny. In Panos Cosmatos' more successful Mandy, the mise en scene is as eye catching and hazily lysergic as in After Blue, but the emblematic characters representing good and evil are so firmly etched that we feel the prick of reality amidst the dream world. The prevailing theme of After Blue is fluidity and there is much blurring of landscape, identity, and sexuality. The dream world of the film is unreal. The end effect, despite the impressive cinematographic play of light and shadow, is soporific.
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