A loveless paradise under the sun
“On Kenya’s beaches they are known as ‘sugar mamas’: European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian woman, travels to this vacation paradise. Paradise Love tells of older women and young men, of Europe and Africa, and of the exploited, who end up exploiting others.” So festival announcements describe Austrian screenwriter, producer and director Ulrich Seidl’s third feature film, co-written with Veronika Franz, also the first part the Paradise trilogy followed by Paradise Faith (2012) and Paradise Hope (2013), which premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and was then featured at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012.
Some eight years ago, French director Laurent Cantet (Human Resources, Time Out) released his third feature film, Heading South, which concerned the ups and downs of three middle-aged women and their search of sex and intimacy with Haitian men. Though not nearly as accomplished as Cantet’s mesmerizing previous films, Heading South had a most sensitive and respectful approach to a rather unexplored theme. And it raised some unnerving questions as to the extent ordinary people go to get something they cannot live without: love, no less. But the screenplay was too straightforward, left no room for ambiguities, and most the dialogue sounded rehearsed.
Now Austrian director Ulrich Seidl (who became somewhat well known locally with the excruciating and valuable Dog Days) tackles other sides of the same theme, albeit under a different scenario. This time Africa is the territory for sexual tourism conducted by avid women in search of, once again, love. Actually, it’d be more accurate to say women keen on paying for sex and hoping they can trick themselves into believing it is love. Needless to say, love is love — and there are no substitutes. And the women here know that too.
Unlike Cantet’s flawed feature, Seidl’s Paradise Love is as riveting as it is compelling. It’s not an easy film to watch, and for a number of reasons; the first one being how bluntly it describes a panorama that admits no romanticizing — even if there are plenty of touches of comedy here and there. It features a handful of daring, yet extremely well pulled off nude scenes that ranger from tender to rough, from erotic to clinical, from embarrassing to cruel — actress Margarete Tiesel undergoes a true tour de force, her obese body often on display and yet never rendered obscene. For that matter, she excels throughout the entire film, be it nude or not. She truly embodies Teresa in a heartfelt, profound fashion.
Paradise Love is about the quest for love, but in the end all that can be portrayed is the absence of love. It’s sympathetic to its characters, it never judges them, and it gives them credit for who they are. At the same time, it offers no answers, no solutions, and is definitively not hopeful. However, there’s not a single blow below the belt, which makes it all the more thought-provoking.
It tells the story of Teresa, a middle-aged single mother who lives in Austria with her adolescent daughter. She is looking for the love she can’t find in her native country (even if she pretends she’s just looking for fun), and so goes on vacation to Kenya with three friends. There are many young men to choose from in East Africa, but in her search for one she can care for she is bothered to the point of harassment. Everyone wants to sell something to her. She thinks she can venture into paying for sex, have a good time, and then leave it at that. But not many things turn out as she thought they would. And that’s when her ordeal begins: when she exposes herself, becomes vulnerable, and gets hurt time and again. No wonder her disillusionment and bitterness in the end.
Actually, that’s one of the reasons why Paradise Love is such an unsettlingly realistic film. Because its characters are truly nuanced, with real actions and reactions, and even more real feelings. Since this type of sentimental prostitution is agreed by both sides, you are asked to see the entire affair from their respective points of views. And in this context, everybody has its reasons, and their reasons do make sense, all of them.
Paradise Love is not about being guilty or innocent for those words fortunately do not apply in this film — there is no simplism to be found here. It’s about exploitation, yes, but the kind of exploitation that benefits and hurts both sides — but the truth is that it actually hurts way more than it benefits. It about turning individuals into objects, time and again, until objects don’t even want to be objects anymore. It’s also about seeing yourself as an object, not only about seeing others as such. That’s why it’s more really more complex than what you may have thought at first glance.
In addition, it’s brilliantly filmed. Scenes are shot mostly in static long takes with a very appealing cinematography and sense of space that eschews all traces of the picturesque, and instead asks from viewers to contemplate and immerse themselves into a canvas of changing colours that reveals more and more layers as it’s painstakingly drawn out.
