Bertrand Mandico | Ultra pulpe (Apocalypse After) / 2018

a lost planet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bertrand Mandico (screenwriter and director) Ultra pulpe (Apocalypse After) / 2018 [37 minutes]

 

French director Bertrand Mandico has created in Apocalypse After a hot-sex art house film that is beautiful to look at but is frankly rather empty in its narrative about a film shoot in which the actress and director, Apocalypse and Joy D’Amato (Pauline Jacquard and Elina Löwensohn) end both their lesbian affair and their cinematic relationship in a series of surreal-like images.

    Pushing both the bond between the two and the actor to give her more of the “subliminal perversions” of film she is seeking, Joy makes films that are essentially filled with allusions from everyone to artist Henry Darger to filmmakers such as Jean Cocteau and Walerian Borowczyk. The images she captures—through Mandico’s camera—are, in fact, quite stunning, but the pop science fiction tale behind it is pure hokum and distracting.

      Critic Brandon Ledet nicely summarizes it: “The Apocalypse After short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics—gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc.”

    He continues  “… In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform.  Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art.  No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them. Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough.  Nothing ever could be.”

 

     Although Mandico’s film also calls up elements of Guy Maddin, Kenneth Anger, and James Bidgood, I’ll take their films any day over the layers of imitation that constitute Mandico’s cinematic world. Perhaps the true missing element here is his utter lack of humor. It’s one thing to imitate those figures I’ve mentioned along with Yann Gonzalez and even Peter Strickland, but it’s quite another to carry the viewer into the work’s narrative. Camp, which at times this film veers towards, is more about the audience than the auteur’s vision.

      I feel chocked, put off, restricted in watching Apocalypse After as if it were an LGBTQ science-fantasy that never once attempted to reach out to me. If Mandico has only paid a little less attention to his own cinematic self-satisfied images and just focused a little more on the viewer, I might have been able to share in his mad fantasies.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).