Reviewed by Cia. Viewed at the AFI Fest 2012.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Produced\u00a0through Ulrich Seidl Film, with Germany’s Tat Film and France’s Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Parisienne as co-producers. Screenplay by Ulrich Seidl & Veronika Franz. Cinematography by \u00a0Wolfgang Thaler &\u00a0Ed Lachman. Editing by\u00a0Christof Schertenleib. Cast: Margarethe Tiesel as Teresa, Peter Kazungu as Munga,\u00a0Inge Maux as Teresa’s friend, Dunja Sowinetz,\u00a0Helen Brugat, Gabriel Mwarua, Josphat Hamisi, Carlos Mkutano.<\/p>\n
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 \u00a0on 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\u00a0The Paradise Trilogy, Paradise: Love, Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope.<\/em><\/p>\n The opening sequence\u00a0of Paradise: Love<\/em> \u00a0is a group of adults with Down Syndrome riding bumper cars in an Austrian \u00a0amusement 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.<\/p>\n Next we follow their supervisor\u00a0Teresa, a middle-aged, heavy set Austrian woman\u00a0(Margarete Tiesel)<\/em>\u00a0as she returns home (a small, modest apartment) to her sulky teenage daughter. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u00a0immediately goes about cleaning the toilet seat the \u00a0handle 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 \u00a0journey full of absurd, comic visuals combined with a fascinatingly real character, while simultaneously tapping our \u00a0third eye.<\/p>\n Teresa befriends another Austrian woman Inge\u00a0Maux\u00a0who\u00a0enthusiastically\u00a0indulges her own aging body in sexual activities with her \u00a0paid 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.<\/p>\n Seidl poses many of the shots in Paradise: Love<\/em> 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 \u00a0point 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. \u00a0The music is perfect, upbeat and festive capturing the sweeter moments of Gabriel “courting” \u00a0Teresa while he teaches her African dance moves.<\/p>\n 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 \u00a0Gabriel, 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 \u00a0feeling. It is like looking through a window at these real peoples lives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewed by Cia. Viewed at the AFI Fest 2012. Produced\u00a0through Ulrich Seidl Film, with Germany’s Tat Film and France’s Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Parisienne as co-producers. Screenplay by Ulrich Seidl & Veronika Franz. Cinematography by \u00a0Wolfgang Thaler &\u00a0Ed Lachman. Editing by\u00a0Christof Schertenleib. Cast: Margarethe Tiesel as Teresa, Peter Kazungu as Munga,\u00a0Inge Maux as Teresa’s friend, Dunja Sowinetz,\u00a0Helen Brugat, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[189,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afi-filmfest-2012","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
After viewing the film, I wondered why the opening scene was part of the film. While I understand the intention, it felt\u00a0unnecessary. A small flaw in a most dynamic film.<\/div>\n<\/div>\nThe story is so character driven and Seidl brilliantly allows it to be just that. There is no commentary, there is no judgement or finger pointing, it is simply a journey that unravels and exposes. What it exposes raises many uncomfortable questions and what these questions are?… \u00a0are up to the viewer. Paradise: Love pushes provocatively with turns of perception so inevitable yet wows with surprise at how masterfully this has been achieved.<\/div>\n