Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl, 2012): Austria | Germany | France

Reviewed by Cia. Viewed at the AFI Fest 2012.

Produced through Ulrich Seidl Film, with Germany’s Tat Film and France’s Société Parisienne as co-producers. Screenplay by Ulrich Seidl & Veronika Franz. Cinematography by  Wolfgang Thaler & Ed Lachman. Editing by Christof Schertenleib. Cast: Margarethe Tiesel as Teresa, Peter Kazungu as Munga, Inge Maux as Teresa’s friend, Dunja Sowinetz, Helen Brugat, Gabriel Mwarua, Josphat Hamisi, Carlos Mkutano.

Originally, Seidl and his wife Veronika Franz’s script consisted of six stories all based on Westerners vacationing in third world countries. They reworked the script, focusing  on three parallel stories and shot on location in Kenya and Austria. The screenplay had no scripted lines but instead instructions for what information each scene needed to contain. Seidl also changed the story line in response to what the actors brought to the development in the scenes. After shooting was completed, Seidl worked for a year and a half on editing the film but could not get it’s length down to less than five and a half hours. He solved it by creating The Paradise Trilogy, Paradise: Love, Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope.

The opening sequence of Paradise: Love  is a group of adults with Down Syndrome riding bumper cars in an Austrian  amusement park. The scene is at once powerful in it’s absurdity and challenging as we watch one of the men slam into the others until they are backed up against the wall, angry and almost in tears. The ride is over and the man displays proud defiance having conquered his entire group.

Next we follow their supervisor Teresa, a middle-aged, heavy set Austrian woman (Margarete Tiesel) as she returns home (a small, modest apartment) to her sulky teenage daughter.  The scene is hysterical as Teresa goes down a list of things she has asked her to do and we wait for the daughter to respond to each one. In the morning she leaves her daughter and her job as supervisor behind for a well deserved vacation in Kenya. She and several white middle-aged tourists arrive in a bus and are greeted by the hotel musical reception. The shot alone, of the tourists standing and watching the hotel musicians is all too funny as are so many shots that Seidl sets up.

Socially, Teresa is polite, proper and cheerful enough in these beautiful surroundings. She has a lovely smile and a pleasant face, but is indeed quite plump and a bit stoic. In her hotel room, she removes her sticky clothing and wearing her underwear she  immediately goes about cleaning the toilet seat the  handle and anything else in the room that may have germs. Before the audience stops laughing, a monkey climbs up onto her patio where Teresa delights in giving him a piece of banana and attempts to take a photo of him eating, only the monkey dashes off and a new monkey is in position for some banana. She tries again and another monkey replaces that one. Her stoic poise makes it all the funnier. Already, Seidl has created a  journey full of absurd, comic visuals combined with a fascinatingly real character, while simultaneously tapping our  third eye.

Teresa befriends another Austrian woman Inge Maux who enthusiastically indulges her own aging body in sexual activities with her  paid for Kenyan “beach boy”. In hilarious conversations about their old flabby bodies and how men have made them feel ugly in the past, Inge goes on about the delicious skin and bodies of the Kenyon men, embarrassing Teresa to school girl giddiness. Teresa shuns the idea of buying sex, insisting that true love is what she wants, someone to look in her eyes, see deep into her heart and love her.

Seidl poses many of the shots in Paradise: Love as beautifully composed straight on static shots with well placed absurd realities, often causing an explosion of laughter that continuously lifts us into the absurd and sad deadpan-documentary-like  point of view of the film. Expansive bright blues of sea and sky with stretches of white sand and serenity create a gorgeous paradise with the absurd reality of aging white people lying in straight rows on lounge chairs, and beautiful Kenyon men, “beach boys” standing quietly at their feet- but on the other side of a low hanging rope. The sound in these shots is as silent as the patience the “beach boys” exercise while waiting for a white woman to get up and cross the rope.  The music is perfect, upbeat and festive capturing the sweeter moments of Gabriel “courting”  Teresa while he teaches her African dance moves.

What works so brilliantly is the combined composition of setting with the raw and boldly intimate work of the actors. Margarete Tiesel’s portrayal of Teresa is gutsy and truthful in exploration of emotionally dark and explicit sexual scenes. Equally outstanding are Gabriel Mwarua, who plays  Gabriel, Peter Kazungu who plays Munga and Teresas Freundin who plays Inge. Since the scenes are primarily improvised with direction to fuel the story forward, the truthful and willingness of these actors engage us in the documentary-like  feeling. It is like looking through a window at these real peoples lives.