New Zealand Film Festival: Paradise: Love
Director: Ulirich Seidl
Ulirich Seidl’s part one of a trilogy of films focuses on an Austrian woman Teresa and her holiday away from the dreary drudge of her solo mother existence.
The opening sequence of all the handicapped youth she looks after playing bumper cars is cleverly uneasy and sets the tone for a film which manages to explore racism, sexism, gender equality and highlight the power structures within society which normally remain unseen.
I had heard of resorts like this from a friend of mine who had travelled to one of them many years ago and it fascinated me. The dichotomy of rubenesque european women who feel unloved in their own culture because of mass media expectations of beauty find the physical desire they desperately want from the sleek well built African men who are dependent on them economically for their on going survival is a complex interweaving of the powerless with the insecure that this film expertly captures in painful intimate detail.
If the protagonists were male exploiting women on a sex holiday tour I would find little sympathy with the plot or characters, but the dynamic of having these damaged women being the predators is so delicious in its exploration that you are glued in for what you know will be an empty hurtful conclusion.
This is a unique film that manages to ask serious questions about powerlessness and exploitation in a brilliant way with metaphors of how the West deals with Africa, how men interact with women and how we all want ultimately to be wanted looming as large as the cinematography of the Kenyan scenery.
3.5 stars
