TIFF 2021: After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
TIFF 2021A few years ago, directors Bertrand Mandico and Katrin Olafsdottir decided to develop their own alt-movie style manifesto akin to the Vinterberg/Von Trier ‘Dogma 95’ articles. The Mandico-Olafsdottir proclamation is known as the ‘Incoherence Manifesto’. Its rules mandate avoiding digital effects, doing all sound in post, using expired film stock, creating vague and dreamy sets, and having actors either overact or underact. ‘Incoherent’ films are meant to be liberating, disturbed, and dreamlike with a freeing aesthetic.
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is a good taste-test for the ‘Incoherence Manifesto’, but it doesn’t make one wish for a buffet. It certainly checks off the boxes on the ‘Incoherence’ rubric. The thing is though, After Blue is completely inaccessible. It’s hard to see the potential value here for the typically accepting audiences for this level of artsiness: film nerd outliers, clusters of academics, or bohemian film pontificators. Other seemingly inaccessible vanity projects have some fringe acceptance. After Blue, with its ideology of unintelligibility, feels like it’s for an audience of one – the filmmaker himself.
Mandico isn’t picking away at this with friends in his garage on weekends for his own learning purposes. He must have finagled a decent little budget. The sets are not insignificant construction projects. Furthermore, it’s an impressive, experienced cast. Elina Löwensohn (Nadja, Schindler’s List), Vimala Pons (Elle), and Agata Buzek (The Innocents, High Life) are professional actresses who’ve been around for a while. It boggles the mind what the sales pitch could have been for this project, which has the actresses periodically prance around nude, shave other women’s neck hair, and just generally go about their business without any forward-moving sense. Furthermore, the cast would have known up front that they’d have to return to redo their voice work in post as nothing would be shot with sound according to the manifesto. It is a wonder the patience that financiers, cast, and crew must have had with this. After Blue is a beyond pretentious film. It’s one thing to create an artful enigma that no one really gets, but After Blue is made specifically in a way that evades much of the collaborative artfulness that goes into filmmaking with the hope that it comes out the other side of production drenched in artistic merit.
After Blue has some value. Some. It’s difficult to randomly throw things at the wall and have nothing stick. The production design deserves a lot of credit for its various sculptures and backdrops. It’s as if the mission was to create a haunted beach for the Halloween fair, and the result is effectively a creepy, dreamy landscape. The cast is quite good from moment to moment even though the labyrinth of a script never takes them anywhere except through the various bizarre chambers of Mandico’s mind where ideas form. The electronic score is pretty good too in its service to this world’s dreaminess. Every so often, a nugget of detail conjures a smile or a chuckle. For instance, the guns in After Blue are named after designers – Chanel and Gucci – and have a hilarious ‘charging’ sound effects.
Ultimately, After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is a difficult film to digest. There are plenty of artists whose works are non-conventional and difficult to get through, but they embrace the form and the tools rather than thumb their noses at them. Take Guy Maddin’s work: largely inaccessible, personal films, but ones that have purpose, form, and a small appreciative audience. After Blue’s formless narrative and anti-message art epitomise the idea that one can achieve purity of artistic merit by avoiding the conventions and tools involved with producing it. The idea is not new. After all, one supposes if you have a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typewriters typing day in and day out, one of them will eventually author a brilliant novel – by sheer probability of random events and limitless time. That could be the same thing here with the ‘Incoherence Manifesto’, but it’s hard to imagine audience tolerance or financiers’ patience lasting till then.