[Film] Paradies: Liebe (dir. Ulrich Seidl)

Your mom goes to Kenya, to buy a boy.

Paradies: Liebe has an novel perspective on brutal issues. Prostitution is explored through the eyes of the aggressor (who is seemingly as harmless as imaginable). The protagonist is a single mom on a holiday. She has a boring caretaking job and an apathetic teenage daughter. She is insecure, fat and mundane. We meet her when she is about to venture alone to explore the dark continent - all the way to Kenya. What eventually becomes clear is that she does not leave for beaches and sunshine, she leaves for nights spent with black youth.

Teresa, our fifty some Austrian mother, is a sex tourist.

This film is very much about exploitation of people and cultures. The surface is sugar sweet. A tranquil holiday resort where everyone is happy. But the paradise is infested with colonial history. The reality of the place is kept out by fences and guards. On the inside the tourists are entertained with banal representations of the local culture. On the other side of the fence we see the begging figures of native Africans.

Tourists are money, and flesh is a merchandise. Sex is for sale, but there has to be a fantasy for that to work without the guilt. The delusion which is created is one of love. Instead of paying for sex they - the sugar moms - pay for invented hospital visits by unseen relatives. They pay for visiting school children who are put on display for cash. They pay for all sorts of humanitarian expenses. In return the African men, young, tender and muscular, act like they love them and adore, and that of course includes a lot of sex.

The film packs a punch through its perspective. We follow Teresa as her fantasy is deconstructed by the obvious reality of the social surroundings. She just means capital to them and they desperately need that cash to provide for their families and community.
How ordinary and uninteresting she is a statement in itself; she could be everybody and that is exactly who commits the evils of this world.

The power relations between a former colony and master is under scrutiny. The film sheds light on the fact that Europeans still manipulate and capitalize on the desperate need of former colonies, and that manipulation runs down to the very core of the being of their subjects as they are forced to sell their culture, bodies and feelings. You realize that this paradise mentioned in the title, is only skin deep, there are currents of suffering right below the surface.

This misery is caused by active participation of ordinary people, who are more than willing to buy into the delusional fantasies constructed to make their consumption seem alright.

But it is not all doom and gloom. The film is actually funny. Almost every frame is thoroughly planed out, often revealing visual jokes and banalities reminding me of Wes Anderson and Aki Kaurismaki work, but not taken to the same extremes. This is a welcome, if not vital, brake from the misery-driven plot.

Ulrich Seidl's film is definitely not pleasant but it is prestigious. Psychologically demanding and socially concerned cinema. You should see it.
- Garðar Þór

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