THE MORNING LIST
Feminine western in a science fiction vein, journey on line B of the RER to meet the inhabitants of the suburbs, trip to Phnom Penh alongside three boys. In theaters, the world at your fingertips.
“After Blue (Paradis sale)”: Bertrand Mandico’s planet of breasts
We left Earth, left our habits in the locker room, for a film-loving journey in orbit and in gold. The journey to the moon has already been done, a long time ago (Méliès, 1902); here we are one hundred and twenty years later on After Blue (Paradis sale), a orange-pink planet populated by women, springing from the imagination of Bertrand Mandico, icon of surrealist cinema produced by Emmanuel Chaumet (Ecce Films). Méliès’ rocket pierced the grimacing Moon’s right eye; Mandico the magician invents a most erotic third eye.
Feminine Western, fantastic, feverish and sensual, After Blue recounts, implicitly, the fantasy of a society that would like to start all over again from scratch. The Earth having become uninhabitable, humans left to settle on a new star, with the idea of eradicating the evil at the root, never to give it time to settle. But the men did not survive in this atmosphere, suffocated by the hairs that grew inside them. Only women remain, whose hair on the contrary is exteriorized. In After Blue, a veritable planet of breasts, the nudity of hairy bodies takes on an animal turn, sexuality mutates right down to ejaculatory breasts.
We dream with our eyes wide open in front of so many finds, puns and agility in making fun of the madness of the world and the permanent war (political, economic, sexual…) which seem to undermine all human action. At the turn of a few cult replicas, After Blue tells us about the empire of brands (or the placement of products in films?), guns becoming “Gucci”, “Paul Smith”, “Chanel”. Fireworks weapons, what better metaphor to defend the cinema? Clarisse Fabré
French film by Bertrand Mandico. With Paula Luna, Elina Löwensohn, Vimala Pons (2 h 07).
“We”: a moving polyptych on the suburbs
The documentaries follow each other, each time neatly arranged behind an identifiable subject, so much so that when one of them isn’t, it destabilizes, and that’s when the cinema begins. We, Alice Diop’s latest feature film, is in no way reducible to one subject but precisely hosts dozens of them thanks to the dynamic bias it has chosen: to travel along line B of the RER, which covers the Ile- de-France from north to south, to reflect the scattered realities that the rail network crosses, often amalgamated under the term “suburb”.
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