Country: Austria
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Time: 2 hours and 1 minute
What It Evokes: Inequalities, transactional sexual relationships, hard to watch films, tourism at its least savory
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
Francine Prose once wrote of Michael Haneke’s Amour, “Can a film be a masterpiece and still make you want to warn people not to see it? Can a movie make you think that an artist has done something extraordinary, original, extremely difficult—and yet you cannot imagine yourself uttering the words, ‘You’ve got to go see Amour’?” Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love can elicit similar reactions.1 This has less to do with the film’s subject matter, which concerns a 50-year-old Austrian woman traveling to Kenya to engage in various forms of sex tourism, than the film’s method of depiction. Lots of movies, including last week’s The Third Man, deal with human malfeasance in more cavalier ways. Instead, Paradise: Love provokes discomfort by turning viewers into voyeurs and rendering them complicit in the acts they witness. In some meaningful sense, all films are about film, but Seidl’s work in particular forces us (as viewers) to confront our desire for characters at their most vulnerable and intimate: Who, exactly, are the real prurient tourists?
To use the technical term, this can leave viewers feeling icky. To actually use a somewhat technical term, this effect gets accomplished in part by the camera being purely “presentational”—an idea that refers to the renunciation of common emplotment and cinematographic tricks that tend to undermine verisimilitude and buttress (cosset?) viewers by erecting distance between a film as film and “things as they really are”. In Paradise: Love, techniques leveraged toward this end include pervasive originator shots (we follow characters as they transit towards spaces in which scenes will culminate), alongside the (often discussed) staples of “neo-realist” and documentary cinema: natural lighting, location shots, non-professional actors.
The film’s plot centers on Teresa, a 50-year-old caretaker for developmentally disabled children, who travels solo to a Kenyan resort for vacation. Just beyond the resort’s pool, a thin rope (metaphor alert!) demarcates private land from a public beach. On one side of the rope, Teresa and her new friends (older, “uglier,” relatively richer Europeans). On the other, younger, handsome Kenyan men hawking various trinkets, as well as their bodies. Over the course of the film, Teresa embarks on a series of sexual relationships with those local men, most prominently Munga and another unnamed Kenyan. What, precisely, Teresa wants remains an open question, though it clearly comprises some mixture of companionship, sex, power, and submission.
Initially, Munga appeals to her precisely because he seems less placatory and more respectful than other men interested in her company. His expressions of affection allow for the maintenance of a certain “willful suspension of disbelief” concerning the nature of their relationship. Payment does not come direct. Instead, Munga introduces his “sister” and her “sick baby” to Teresa and asks for cash to pay for the child’s treatment. Teresa is offered the chance to play savior—noblesse oblige in the developing world—but this breaks the desired terms of engagement by surfacing her economic power and revealing the conditionality of Munga’s attentiveness. In requesting assistance, Munga speaks what remains patently obvious—but because it cannot be explicitly stated, since this would be to incur Teresa’s rejection, deceit becomes necessary. This deceit collapses the fantasy, makes the entanglement impossible for Teresa, and breeds resentment and deep hurt. In part, the brilliance of Seidl’s film rests in the indeterminate nature of power within this relationship. Both sides feel vulnerable, even when power has been ceded by the other. In turn, this insecurity breeds callousness and coldness, alongside a steady disenchantment. Over time, it becomes easier to objectify the other. (This of course can be read as metaphor for various forms of encounter from the neo-colonial aspects of tourism to the camera's transactional relationship with its subject.)
As the film progresses, Teresa’s hurt leads her to grow more comfortable with the transactional terms of these relationships, culminating in a near-final scene in which Teresa and a couple friends (also tourists) hire an employee at their hotel to strip for their pleasure, embodying a form of power and enacting a form of degradation that can be particularly difficult to watch. (A.O. Scott in The New York Times wondered if the use of non-professional actors in this scene constituted its own form of exploitation, which I think misses the point but does capture something about the discomfort the scene can provoke.)
To step back for a second, debates around sex work tend to orient around two poles. The first concerns autonomy, or the level of choice exercised by a sex worker. Constraints imposed upon the exercise of agency can take many forms: physical coercion, economic deprivation, social mores or patriarchal structures that limit alternative viable pathways for individuals of unfavorable status. The second tends to concern whether and how the sale of sexual acts constitute a categorically different form of transaction than other types of physical labor (i.e. selling the use of one’s body to an employer for, say, the unloading of packages from a truck). Of course, sex has always existed within a set of material (and cultural) conditions that influence its disbursement, but the nakedly transactional nature of sex work tends to bring this fact into sharper relief. Sex tourism further surfaces interpersonal power imbalances driven by global economic inequalities, racial disparities, and border regimes—these of course exist when it comes to in-country prostitution, but they’re harder to overlook when one party has traveled for the express purpose of soliciting fornication. Sex tourism undertaken by individuals from developed countries in underdeveloped countries tends to figuratively reproduce the least savory aspects of colonial histories, while surfacing the inequalities that both undergirded and emanated from past forms of political and economic domination. (There is a reason “rape” constituted a primary metaphor in the lexicon of anti-colonial thinkers when describing colonial relations.)
Seidl upends many of the tropes associated with these debates by inverting their prevailing gender dynamics and by focusing attention on the John (i.e. Teresa). Within Austrian society, her desires have been marginalized by virtue of her status as a not classically attractive, not young, not wealthy woman. (In talking about Carlos Reygadas' Japón, we discussed how older individuals’ sexual desires, particularly older women’s desires, rarely receive serious treatment in film.) Paradise: Love takes both Teresa’s physical beauty and desire deeply seriously, sustaining attention on her person through impeccably framed shots and alluring visual symmetries. The movie’s insistence on frequently displaying her nude body and the centering of her sexual drives thus highlights aspects of human experience all too often overlooked, but it also emerges as deeply troubling because those drives manifest in the objectification of poorer black bodies. (One can perhaps find echoes of Auden’s line: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”—or, in a more naked alternative, “Shit rolls downhill.” But this remains a terminal observation in a film interested in various human potentialities.) That the film manages to explore such difficult topics while rendering each character an object of compassion elevates it into a work of art.
I think what tends to make this film hard to watch—not to pick on A.O. Scott, but he clearly didn’t find it easy—remains less its unremitting look at unsavory behaviors exercised within fairly bleak and unequal political, economic, and social conditions, but rather its unwillingness to facilitate easy moral judgments. This results from a sensitivity towards the ways in which all parties feel deeply vulnerable, uncertain, and lacking in control. (Naturally, explicit and at times very ham-fisted sex on screen tends to make people uncomfortable, but I don’t think that’s a particularly interesting topic.) Throughout, Seidl eschews ready-made ethical framings and moral accountings: we encounter the is without transcending to the ought.2 This absence can feel confrontational, since we like to think of directors as protective guides and of stories as having morals. Seidl's examination of marginalized individuals who behave poorly builds empathy and identification by exploring individual complexity, while avoiding the easy trap of rendering characters pitiable or devolving narratives into reductive and cheap good/bad framings. Indeed, much worthy art feels confrontational and difficult when it first appears. This is worth embracing. It's Duchamp and that pesky urinal all over again.
Seidl and Haneke often get paired in discussions since they’re both Austrian and they both make movies that make audiences uncomfortable. Seidl has always seemed to me much more interested in human behavior, while Haneke’s works tends towards philosophical questions and the ways their operative concepts manifest. Who works the colder camera is anyone’s guess.
This comes from David Hume’s philosophy. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it more succinctly than I could: “Hume says here that no ought-judgment may be correctly inferred from a set of premises expressed only in terms of ‘is,’ and the vulgar systems of morality commit this logical fallacy. This is usually thought to mean something much more general: that no ethical or indeed evaluative conclusion whatsoever may be validly inferred from any set of purely factual premises.”