‘Paradise: Love’ — Mostly Business, Little Pleasure

Poor Teresa was only looking for some love. For a frumpy, 50-year-old Austrian divorcee who exists to pick up after her sullen teenage daughter, a small dose of carnal pleasure and tropical paradise could be just what the doctor ordered. As it turns out, there are few things more grim than this unflinching view of mutual exploitation and saggy breasts.

Teresa, played by Margarathe Tiesel, is just another European woman who makes sex tourism a sustainable trade in developing countries like Kenya. No longer sexually viable in their home countries, these women have no issue subsidizing their male prostitutes in exchange for a hard body and the opportunity to feel sexy again.

“It feels so great. I can’t tell you the things I’ve given up for men,” confesses a tacky friend. Indeed, there’s no one way around the racism, classism, lingering colonialism, and, on the other hand, displaced model of patriarchy. Tired of being objectified by European men, the women objectify African men–to the point of referring to them as walking hard-ons–and revel in the experience of being “loved” the way they are. As long as these gritty transactions are viewed as such, it’s okay if their male escorts have a wild amount of medical expenses in their families.

Suffice it to say that our naive protagonist was looking for something more. She just wants someone to look into her eyes––to really see her as a person. But I guess the film’s great success is leaving us with little in the way of heroes or villains; obvious matters of privilege aside, the characters take advantage of each other, and if you do wind up feeling sorry for Teresa when no one calls her on her birthday (and she cries herself to sleep after the bartender refuses her advances), there’s also this definite sense of “well, she got what she deserved.”

It makes a lot of sense that Austrian director Ulrich Seidl has a background in documentary film, because as much as this movie was based on a screenplay, there’s nothing overly scripted or cinematic about it. Seidl uses both professional and first-time actors, as well as real world sets, to lend a painfully voyeuristic quality to the whole graceless ordeal. It’s a long movie, and you’ll probably find yourself wishing he’d spent half as much time depicting the birthday stripper minstrel show or allowing the characters to talk at length about their pubic hair. But if you find yourself somewhat unwell and exhausted by the end, that may have been the whole point.

It’s a veritable meat market, after all. The women literally compare a man’s skin to shiny bacon rind. “Do you know how to say blood sausage?” they shriek at him. The natives all apparently look the same, but at the very least, the women can “tell them apart by their size” and refer to them as “bed-time treats” in a language they don’t understand. The souvenir peddlers and prostitutes are hardly less predatory, swarming the tourists at every opportunity and demanding more money even after they’ve successfully emptied their wallets. There’s something awfully poignant about watching Munga’s “sister” (read: wife with a “sick child” who guilt-tripped Teresa to the tune of 10,000 schillings) tell her to get lost when she comes back to the village in pursuit of her slippery lover. She manages to get more money out of her and call her an idiot in the same breath, illustrating the post-colonial paradigm of “fuck you – you want to patronize me? So patronize me, ass-clown.”

Seidl is certainly not subtle when it comes to these themes. You’ll encounter more than one of these self-obvious images, including the beach scenes where there’s a rope cordoning off the peddlers as they gaze upon the glaringly white sunbathing women, as well as a parting shot of men cartwheeling past Teresa as she walks alone in the opposite direction. The African men will continue performing, and Teresa will continue to be lonely– and if their paths cross momentarily, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about it.

Who Should Watch It: Anyone with a fascination for the clothing choices of German tourists (or a tendency to be buoyed by schadenfreude).