Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticHer name is Roxy, but the village girls call her Toxic. With peroxide-blond hair and the Lolita-like naiveté of a vintage sexploitation-movie heroine, Roxy wanders through a post-apocalyptic world as unfamiliar to us as it is to her — for we have all stepped into the parallel dimension that is underground filmmaker Bertrand Mandico’s erotic imagination.
Welcome to the dirty paradise of “After Blue.”Humans have poisoned earth and fled to a new planet, which they’ve dubbed After Blue (a slightly awkward use of English in this otherwise-French-language production, no doubt intended to sound chic to Gallic audiences).
Screens and machines have since been banished, making way for a kind of old-world mysticism of sparkling dust, psychedelic lights and occult symbols — like a third eye, superimposed over the pubic triangle of the most enlightened.
Operating in the mode of Polish porno-surrealist Walerian Borowczyk, Mandico creates sensual mood trips using only practical effects (this one could be the “Barbarella”-style sci-fi film-within-a-film being produced in Mandico’s 2018 meta-textual short “Ultra Pulpe”).
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