PARADISE: LOVE - CRITERION CHANNEL

So, it’s only taken several years for me to backtrack and watch the first installment of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Love. While the order seems almost immaterial, Love does set the whole thing up by putting all the women the series features in one place and sending them on their journies.

Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is off on a trip to Africa for her 50th birthday. There, she plans to lounge on the beach with other Austrian women her age, a few of whom have been there before and can show her the ropes. Specifically, how to purchase her own local lover. Young men in the area accept cash and gifts to be these women’s companions, all the while professing their love, selling a thin illusion that the women aren’t necessarily buying, it just comes with the package. Teresa’s friends giggle over the boys’ naïveté and joke about them in German so they can’t understand what they are saying. Teresa isn’t sure about the whole thing at first, she wants to be treated a certain way, but pretty soon she goes from kidding herself about the affection she receives to being just one of the gals.

Seidl applies a sharp satirical edge to the ugly tourists here. The ladies don’t mask their true feelings, particularly with the language barrier to hide behind. They treat resort staff like performing animals, and the boys they hire like property. Which is easy enough to get agry about, but Seidl’s camera is wide enough to look at both sides, making Paradise: Love a more intriguing puzzler than the simple premise might suggest. The real trick of this movie is how often it flips the audience’s allegiances. While first we judge Teresa, as we eventually see her nervous bedroom habits, we begin to feel sorry for her. Tiesel portrays Teresa’s longing with quiet empathy. She could really use the love that the young men claim. We also see the two-way flow of bartering here, as her second relationship with a quiet, calming fellow named Munga (Peter Kazungu) turns from nights spent in bed to days spent doling out charity to Munga’s family, all of whom demand more than Teresa is able to give--and even insulting her from behind their own language barrier. While she is indulging in ghetto tourism, he is taking full advantage of her loneliness and her motherly instincts. (Initial love scenes with each man she couples with all turn into tutelage rather than passion.)

Of course, Teresa doesn’t react well to discovering Munga’s con, and so she goes back to trawling the beaches for a new hire. There’s a sad willingness on her part to believe each man will treat her better than the last, that he is sincere because he says so, to a degree that the hustlers are almost in sync with one another, refining the sales pitch with each new encounter. It’s a weird cycle, because for a bit we believe, too. Maybe it will be better. Maybe she’ll be better. But no, Teresa’s failures don’t improve her failings; she is no kinder to the others she meets. The whole thing culminates in her birthday party, where the women literally purchase a man for a night of fun and games, ridiculing and humiliating him. All the while, he pretends to like it, but other parts of his body betray that smile on his face as a forced lie.

As with all the Paradise films, one is left to ponder what exactly Seidl is saying about love. His laid-back presentation offers no real editorializing, and though he does show some sympathy for Teresa, his narrative does not take a side. Is his view of human relationships so cynical that he sees love as a series of transactions rather than a genuine connector? Or is the point here that there is a greater divide in the world than we care to admit, that different races and nations, as it stands, can’t possibly come together on equal footing?

Probably a little of all that. In Teresa’s individual case, she’s definitely not getting what she wants, but as the song goes, she sometimes gets what she needs. And perhaps that’s the underlying factor of all the films, that these big concepts like love and hope and faith are not as easily contained as we’d like, but maybe if we got honest with ourselves, we’d get just enough to get by.

Screencaps taken from Christopher McQuain's DVDTalk review of Paradise: Love.

PARADISE: HOPE - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl completes his downer of a film trilogy with Paradise: Hope, the most youthful story of the three Paradise movies, though no less downbeat for its age or the better tomorrows falsely promised in its title.

Melanie Lenz stars in Paradise: Hope as Melanie, an adolescent girl whose mother has sent her to a diet camp for the summer to lose some weight. (Mom has gone to Kenya, as seen in Paradise: Love [review]; her aunt is the main character in Paradise: Faith [review]). Melanie joins the a dormitory of girls, all of whom are as unmotivated to be there as she is. The camp is a kind of prison, where food and activity are regulated. Phone time is limited, and days are spent learning about nutrition and performing often humiliating exercises. You know that old ditty "if you're happy and you know it clap your hands"? At diet camp, it's "clap your fat." Thighs, belly, bum.

Looking to get out of exercising, Melanie goes to the facility doctor (Joseph Lorenz) feigning a stomachache. He is clearly skeptical of this ailment, but he examines the girl anyway, making playful, possibly flirtatious, use of his stethoscope. Melanie is smitten, and she returns to see him regularly. In their private sessions, he seems to like her, too; in public, he rebukes her. Theirs is an unhealthy relationship no matter how you cut it, signifying a hopeful future as out of reach as Melanie's intended weight loss.

Seidl portrays the diet camp with the same dry brushstrokes as he used in the preceding films, but the dispassionate rendering makes the setting seem surreal and almost satirical. The grinding routine only succeeds in making the kids feel bad about themselves, and in the absence of food, they become obsessed with sex and other mischief. Underlying all their talk about the grooming habits of the opposite sex and past dalliances, however, is the same basic yearning: each child really just longs to be loved and made to feel safe. Even at her most reckless, Melanie is looking to attract affection and attention. In his way, the doctor provides these things, even if we never are exactly clear on his motives.

Lenz and her young castmates perform with a natural comfort. Much of what Seidl captures comes across as genuine horseplay, as if his troupe is merely living out the summer camp scenario he created for them. This makes the emotional danger in Paradise: Hope feel even more crucial, even if some of it is a bit cartoony. (At a bar, Melanie is victimized by two greased-up juvenile delinquents lifted out of a 1950s exploitation movie.) This realism also makes it all the more deflating when the film draws no conclusions for its young protagonist. She is just as alone and helpless in the end as she was in the beginning, only now more hurt and disappointed. In terms of ironic stingers, Paradise: Hope is the bleakest.

PARADISE: FAITH - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.

Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy is a series of films connected thematically by the three different theological tenets that give them their name, as well as by the story aspect of each film being about different sisters in the same family. Their easiest comparison is to Kieslowski's Trois Coleurs [review], but Paradise has even less crossover elements than that masterwork.

Paradise: Faith is ostensibly the second part of the series, though they really can be watched in any order. (True confessions, I had yet to see Paradise: Love, the initial release, when first writing this review, but have seen it now.) Faith stars Maria Hofstätter as Anna, a middle-aged woman who has devoted her free time to bringing Catholicism back to Austria. Her chosen mode of witnessing is traveling door-to-door with a statue of the Virgin Mary and trying to convert the sinners she finds, blessing them with holy water dispensed from a spray bottle. She's terrible at the job. What she lacks in empathy she makes up for in self-righteousness. Some of the scenes of her testimony are painful to watch. A hoarder who accepts her help has difficulty kneeling, but she insists he position himself in just the right way. A drunk woman toys with her, and Anna's stubbornness nearly pushes her to violence.

By that point, we have the sense that these reactions may be just fine with Anna. She intends to suffer for her belief. When she fails, she repents through self-flagellation and a chain-link girdle. Each obstacle is just a test from Jesus.

The biggest test comes when Anna's estranged husband returns without warning. Nabil (Nabil Saleh) is an Egyptian Muslim and also a paraplegic. He is baffled and angered by his wife's conversion to Christianity, and though we never know for sure why he left, we do see him be both physically and verbally abusive. Perhaps it's his cruelty that has made Anna tone-deaf to the suffering of others. She believes God crippled Nabil to help him. His time in the wheelchair hasn't inspired personal reflection, however; not unless it's an act of faith to spend a lot of time thinking about sex. (If so, guess who has ten typing fingers and is going to Heaven? This guy!)

It's certainly to Seidl's credit that he gives no lip service to either religion in Paradise: Faith. One is not pitted against the other, and really, viewers might hazard a guess that the auteur has little regard for religion in general. What is more interesting to him is how both Anna and Nabil use their faith to cover their own shortcomings. As the old Bible verse suggests, one usually points out the splinter in another's eye while denying the massive plank in their own.

Paradise: Faith lacks an editorial point of view. Rather, the director holds his camera back, keeping his distance, letting the scenes run their natural length without unnecessary cuts. This makes the more difficult scenes even more uncomfortable. The viewer gets no chance to look away, and can't gauge when the moment will finally break. The resulting squirm factor can be excruciating.

Adding to this is the realism of the locales and, more importantly, the performances. Neither Hofstätter nor Saleh appear to ever really be acting. None of the cast looks like actors. Thus, the usual telltale signs of playing to the camera are absent, leaving only the individuals. It's one step shy of documentary. We are the omniscient observer, the God in which these people should have faith, if you will.

Seidl's drama can be tough work. Its lack of conventional plot requires that one pay absolute attention, even as the filmmaker's refusal to sugarcoat or add any adornment at all might compel you to turn away. Accept that Paradise: Faith is heading somewhere, though, and you'll be surprised by how much the film has moved you in the end. Most likely it'll be closer to depression, because uplifting it ain't. Misery is sometimes it's own reward, if not a couple hours of company.