Director: Ulrich Seidl
Talent: Margarete Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux
Release Date: 14th June 2013
Ulrich Seidl’s reputation as Austrian cinema’s enfant terrible precedes him on the international stage, as well as a body of work which includes such bleak and unsettling work as 1996’s Animal Love (“Never have I looked so directly into hell” – Werner Herzog) and 2007’s Palme d’Or-winning Import/Export, which depicted the precarious and exploitative living conditions of immigrants in modern Europe.
His Paradise trilogy (Love, Faith, Hope), to be screened in three parts over June, July and August, begins with Paradise: Love, which explores Austrian (and generally German-speaking) women’s sex tourism at a Kenyan beach resort. The protagonist is Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), a middle-aged woman who feels that her age and body-shape make her unattractive to men. With the encouragement of a like-minded holiday-maker, she resolves to enter into a relationship with one of the many local “beach boys”, who are more than happy to provide sex and companionship to the visiting “sugar mamas” in exchange for financial support. This contract is vague, and not explicitly verbalised: Teresa wants the experience of romance and seduction, while the succession of men in whom she seeks this fulfilment persuade her to give more and more money to them, their families and friends for various, often dubious, emergencies and exigencies. The extent to which Teresa’s notions of love and courtship are culturally specific, and thus enacted in this context as an exploitative relationship, as well as the unspoken extent to which the relationship is economically precarious, makes for an unsettling contrast of two different kinds of exploitation awkwardly acted out in tandem.
The film is shot in Seidl’s recognisable tableau, in which stark surfaces and lines (walls, railings, etc.) sit parallel and perpendicular to a camera which itself remains static and level with the ground, evoking those images of early cinema in which the filming apparatus largely determined the formal properties of the shot. Seidl switches to handheld for the film’s busier scenes, of travel or dynamic movement (and, sometimes, sex), which are all the more effective for this contrast, between the singular, “closed systems” that Deleuze identifies in Dreyer’s cinema to the “eye that would be in things” of the more kinetic, naturalistic approach begat by a moving camera. Of the first shot type, Seidl’s work has been compared to medieval portraiture, with its monolithic images of little ambiguity. How stark a contrast his subject matter, as well as the formal tinkering, creates with this determination, and how fiercely it resists simple categorisation! This is just not a film about the pervasiveness of cultural misogyny (and ageism) in the West, though the scenes in which the Austrian women bemoan their bodies as undesirable and disgusting are powerful, and give some context, both explicit and implicit, for their reasons for being at the beach resort; nor is it just a film about racism, and the exploitation of African people in a “post-colonial” world, both economic and sexual, though some of the sentiments expressed by the same women are excruciatingly condescending and bigoted; and not to mention the obvious economic inequality that makes the type of tourism depicted in the film tenable on a grand scale: Paradise: Love is a difficult film which constantly denies the viewer the pleasure of moral unambiguity. Its characters are subjects of sexist, racist and economic oppression, while themselves to varying extents participating in and perpetuating these systems as oppressors. As the film goes on, do we not, like Teresa, find ourselves hoping in vain for a simple catharsis? — ours spectatorial, of sitting in judgement, of identification — and one which would, necessarily, be culturally specific. The narrative becomes a succession of transactions in which we are directly implicated.
Make no mistake, Paradise: Love is an uncomfortable, uncompromising film, engaging with a specific, banal horror of neo-colonialist exploitation while providing the uneasy context of its attendant, intertwining narratives of oppression. It’s no sociology essay, however, but a beautiful, striking, visceral and personal cinematic experience, helped in no small part by Seidl’s use of non-professional actors (a constant throughout his career). With a first instalment so ambitious and brilliant, one can have high hopes for the rest of the trilogy.
