Bertrand Mandico

[Matt]

Filmography

Theatrical Features
Les Garçons sauvages [The Wild Boys] (2017)
After Blue (Paradise sale) [After Blue (Dirty Paradise)] (2021)
Conann [She Is Conann] (2023)

Short films
La Chanson du Jardinier Fou (1997)
Le cavalier bleu (1999)
Monsieur Flupersu (2000)
Osmose (2002)
Chris Dangoisse : De droite (2002)
Chris Dangoisse : Ils dansent (2002)
C’était le chien d’Eddy (2003)
Tout ce que vous avez vu est vrai [All You Have Seen Is True] (2004)
Il dit qu'il est mort... [He Says He's Dead] (2006)
Mie l’enfant descend du songe (2007)
Essai 135 (2007)
Sa majesté petite barbe [His Majesty Little Beard] (2009)
Lif og daudi Henry Darger [The Life and Death of Henry Darger] (2010)
Burlesque et froid [Burlesque and Cold] (2010)
Boro in the Box (2011)
La résurrection des natures mortes [Living Still Life] (2012)
Féminisme, rafale et politique (2013)
Prehistoric Cabaret (2013)
S... Sa... Salam... Salammbô... (2014)
Souvenirs d'un montreur de seins [Memories of a Boobs Flasher] (2014)
Notre-Dame des Hormones [Our Lady of Hormones] (2015)
Y a-t-il une vierge encore vivante ? [Any Virgin Left Alive?] (2015)
Depressive Cop (2015)
Odile dans la vallée [Odile of the Valley] (2017)
L’île aux robes (2018)
Ultra pulpe [Apocalypse After] (2018)
À rebours (2018)
Niemand (Kompromat music video, 2019)
ExtaZus: Temple of Sorrow / Lune de fiel / Feelings (M83 music video trilogy, 2019)
The Return of Tragedy (2020)
Dead Flash (2021)
HUYSwoMANS (2021)
The Last Cartoon (2022)
J’ai tué Kate Bush (2022)
The Last Cartoon - Nonsense, Optimistic, Pessimistic (2023)
Rainer, A Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley (2023)
Nous les barbares [We Barbarians] (2023)

DVD / Blu-ray releases
Mandico In The Box [France: Malavida Films, DVD only, 1998]
Mandico - Box 2 - Hormona et vanités (short film collection) [Potemkine Films, 2013]
The Wild Boys [France: UFO Distribution, 2023 / US: Altered Innocence, 2018]
Ultra Pulpe aet autres chairs (short film collection] [France: Potemkine Films, 2021]
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) [France: UFO Distribution, 2023 / US: Altered Innocence, 2022]
Apocalypse After (short film collection) [US: Altered Innocence / Mondo Macabro, 2022]
She Is Conann [US: Altered Innocence, 2024]

Online resources
Rotterdam 2018 Interview: WILD BOYS, Bertrand Mandico on Shooting Gender-Bending Surreal Film
Bertrand Mandico's Inspirations for The Wild Boys
Bertrand Mandico on Metamorphosis, Lovable Monsters, and the Obscure Object of Desire
New Mutations: Bertrand Mandico Discusses After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
Bertrand Mandico Talks About ‘After Blue’ and His Upcoming ‘She Is Conan’
Delving into the Surrealist World of She is Conann with Director Bertrand Mandico
Queering Conann: Bertrand Mandico Talks Influence and Intention

[colinr0380]

Les garçons sauvages (Bertrand Mandico)
Recently thrust into the spotlight thanks to Cahiers naming it the best film of 2018, this is a bizarre fantasy film that has a lot to say about gender norms but it does so rather incoherently. I'm not convinced there's a fully-formed ideology driving this film, but the movie is so relentlessly peculiar in what it throws on-screen that I'm not too bothered by its impenetrability. Ostensibly the movie tweaks pre-existent homoeroticism found in boys adventure stories, giving us a quintet of bad kids who are sent away by their rich families on an island excursion with The Captain, a one-breasted grizzled seaman who looks like a Tom of Finland drawing. He ties the boys up in leashes for the duration of their journey aboard the ship, pulling their lines in and out from the control room, all while the rear-projection runs in the back (the rear projection gags peak early with a clever visual joke in the boys' trial, but it remains an additional level of distancing in the film throughout). Once they arrive on the island, the lads encounter phallic fruits and a sexual variation on a Venus Flytrap, among other sights. The film is so scatological and vulgar (which is especially amusing considering the winking final line of the film) that it eventually won me over by not being so in half-measures-- in for a penny, in for a pound on this kind of perversity. The film's biggest gimmick is surely that the boys are all played by girls, which adds an additional level of gender obfuscation, especially considering where the plot goes. I'm stunned this received an American Blu-ray release, as while it may sound "of the moment," it's sexual depictions are so dicey that it would probably be a lot more controversial were it not way too weird for those who'd raise the alarm bells to get very far into it.

If you enjoyed it I'd recommend watching his earlier shorts, as they are very similar

Bertrand Mandico’s She is Conann

I'm presuming that this is all building up to the inevitable "Conann vs Kate Bush" face-off film!

[Matt]

Dying to know what Bertrand Mandico took from the closet.

[therewillbeblus]

Curious for some impressions from VS' 'almost-OOP' bargain bin:

-If I've liked Bertrand Mandico's other work, is After Blue a safe blind-buy?
-If I did not like Knife + Heart, is there a chance I'll enjoy Yann Gonzalez / You and the Night?

[swo17]

Yes on Mandico

[furbicide]

I thought Knife + Heart was the better of the two features, but it is also very different visually and tonally so it’s possible you might be into the earlier film (I haven’t seen the shorts).

I’ve been mulling over getting that Gonzalez disc myself for ages as I found You and the Night quite striking and unique, but I’m not sure I actually enjoyed it enough to be motivated to sit down and watch it again!

[therewillbeblus]

Helpful, thanks both of you!

[therewillbeblus]

Yes on Mandico

Okay, so After Blue is awesome. I see he came out with another film released by Altered Innocence (but not available on VS' site) called She Is Conann - has anyone seen this and can confirm it's in step with the others? This guy's wild

[Peacock]

Okay, so After Blue is awesome. I see he came out with another film released by Altered Innocence (but not available on VS' site) called She Is Conann - has anyone seen this and can confirm it's in step with the others? This guy's wild

I haven’t seen it yet but Mandico considers She is Conann the third part of a trilogy, with The Wild Boys representing Paradise, After Blue purgatory and She is Conann hell. So definitely worth watching all three!

[therewillbeblus]

Mandico considers She is Conann the third part of a trilogy, with The Wild Boys representing Paradise, After Blue purgatory and She is Conann hell. So definitely worth watching all three!

Fascinating, thanks for the context - What a depiction of purgatory!

[swo17]

Conann doesn't come out until next month

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I just saw that. I also noticed that I contributed to a subtitle pot on back channels a while ago, so I did know about this film's existence after all

[Matt]

I also endorse Mandico, probably my favorite working filmmaker right now.

[therewillbeblus]

Outside of this trilogy and the short film collection from AI, has he done anything else worth seeking?

[furbicide]

Yes on Mandico

Okay, so After Blue is awesome. I see he came out with another film released by Altered Innocence (but not available on VS' site) called She Is Conann - has anyone seen this and can confirm it's in step with the others? This guy's wild

Yep, I caught it at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year! I can't say I enjoyed it quite as much as After Blue, but it's still a lot of fun, and you can absolutely expect something similarly insane and creative.

[Matt]

Outside of this trilogy and the short film collection from AI, has he done anything else worth seeking?

He’s done a handful of music videos, mostly for M83, which are on YouTube. I have not seen any of the newer (post After Blue) shorts.

[swo17]

This label's Vol. 1 shorts collection includes unique shorts from Mandico and Peter Strickland, among others. EDIT: Actually, Mandico's Vol. 1 short is a music video for Kompromat's "Niemand."

He’s done a handful of music videos, mostly for M83

Thanks for the tip, what a perfect match!

[Mr Sausage]

I really appreciate you all recommending Mandico. I just watched The Wild Boys. A wild, surreal, symbolic, psycho-sexual fairy tale? That's like tailor made for my tastes. I want to see everything this guy's done.

[therewillbeblus]

All his stuff is in that wheelhouse, so you won't be disappointed. I still think The Wild Boys is my favorite, but that may just be for the sake of novelty since it was my entry point as well

[Mr Sausage]

I went in blind, so I didn't know until towards the end that all the young boys were played by girls. It helped clarify the Shakespeare/theatrical theme, ie. cross dressing actors.

[therewillbeblus]

This is one of those films where, even if you don't go in completely blind to some small details, you're still going in blind to a large extent.. because there's no real way to describe its eccentric approach until you experience it. Pretty cool

[Mr Sausage]

Yes on Mandico

Okay, so After Blue is awesome. I see he came out with another film released by Altered Innocence (but not available on VS' site) called She Is Conann - has anyone seen this and can confirm it's in step with the others? This guy's wild

So After Blue is the apocalyptic sci-fi western to The Wild Boys' erotic boys' own adventure fairy tale. Cool. Mandico has really invented his own universe. A goopy, glittery, sexual one. Tho' they have very different personal styles, Mandico reminds me of Cattet and Forzani, another pair of singular artists who use genre pastiche to create their own highly individual universe.

Speaking of Cattet and Forzani, are they ever going to make another movie? It's been seven years since Let the Corpses Tan.

[therewillbeblus]

Yes on Mandico

Okay, so After Blue is awesome. I see he came out with another film released by Altered Innocence (but not available on VS' site) called She Is Conann - has anyone seen this and can confirm it's in step with the others? This guy's wild

So After Blue is the apocalyptic sci-fi western to The Wild Boys' erotic boys' own adventure fairy tale. Cool. Mandico has really invented his own universe. A goopy, glittery, sexual one. Tho' they have very different personal styles, Mandico reminds me of Cattet and Forzani, another pair of singular artists who use genre pastiche to create their own highly individual universe.

Mandico considers She is Conann the third part of a trilogy, with The Wild Boys representing Paradise, After Blue purgatory and She is Conann hell. So definitely worth watching all three!

Watching She is Conann and looking back on these posts, I'm wondering if Mandico is using specific spins on gender to indicate his views - particularly

SpoilerShow

if The Wild Boys is heaven and She is Conann is hell, then is heaven boys tapping into their femininity, while hell is women coerced into a life of acclimating to masculine aggression? The vacuousness of a protagonist's character as we watch her progression seems to indicate just that: this sense of rape of an identity, of a life, of a parent, of time itself. If it's the weakest film, it's because we don't really care about this person, as they're discovering themselves through flashbacks too, but this fits with Mandico's idea of hell: suppressed agency, and forced parameters to wield it against one's moral compass - so much so, that one's morality morphs to adjust to the 'new' nature; a sense of self becomes a foreign concept divorced from the expected role, or the one limited to ascend into if one wishes to "succeed" in this world. It would be an interesting double feature with Crimes of the Future in the first sense, and Assassination Nation in the second. And After Blue's messiness and gender-bending qualities seem to fit perfectly for the murky space of purgatory, but it seems less clearly-defined what's being signified outside of the already-elliptical polarities.

[Mr Sausage]

I really like that interpretation, but part of me suspects it might be too schematic for Mandico, who likely doesn't work out his fantasias too heavily.

SpoilerShow

In The Wild Boys, heaven does seem female (nourishing, generative, wet, and in the shape of a clam), but at the same time the story is cyclical, and the feminizing doesn't actually seem to correct the boys: the most bold and aggressive of the group is as bold and aggressive as a woman as they were as a man, and the group in general has no issue seducing and murdering the pack of sailors before heading out on a mission dressed as sailors, a very masculine idea. So...I don't know. After Blue is a tricky one, but regarding the hair: hair (maleness?) turns inward on men and kills them, but grows outward on women and is groomed and managed as a facet of society. Pretty odd, and easily allegorized tho' I don't think the film is quite doing that. On a socio-political level, tribalism and xenophobia prevail, with the protagonists being cast out from society to wander in a wasteland, scrabbling for existence, but it's only in the wasteland one discovers art. The Wild Boys was aristocratic, too, while After Blue is working class. I haven't seen She is Conann, yet, so I don't know if there's anything to be made out of this.

The whole Divine Comedy thing may be no more complicated than one is set on an island paradise, the other in a wasteland, and the last one wherever it's set, and that's about it. The more I pick at the film's ideas around gender, the less clear and pointed they become. Which is why I wonder if there is any overarching ideas about gender in the trilogy. Mandico may be trying to twist and complicate gender rather than lend it social and political clarity. I dunno. What do you think?

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I was thinking very broadly painting canvases even if the beliefs are more specific. The other is that hell is the soul separated from the body or other tangible signifiers of living - as indicated by

Vague spoiler for She is Conann's narrationShow

the voiceover at the end of She is Conann referring to itself as one damned to watch Conann go through the process of rediscovering memory. Is that the soul? This might make Hell synonymous for growth, or rather 'regret' which is channeled by growth in a foreign (or ill-fitting) world, while The Wild Boys is about 'discovery' - even if there isn't much growth, discovering new elements of someone is heavenly.

Just some stray thoughts - that wouldn't make Heaven actually a sociopolitical utopia, nor Hell an escapable place; but each film details a surreal version of processes we engage in, that universally yield emotionally-novel responses for each of us. Maybe that dissonance between the universal and the personal is what he's most interested in exploring with his art.