Critics reviews

The opening giggle of Seidl's trilogy—Teresa's own summertime scarlet letter—makes for a lapsed vision of love; the splintered logic of the route from Love's laughter to a screaming Faith means ending with the tiresome, breathless Hope for a paradise that may not exist at all. In Seidl's sometimes beautiful, beguiling hall of walls and windows—not a mirror in sight—one hopes with whispers.

While in this scene [where the women fail to arouse the young local man], Teresa explores and exploits the limits of her control, her sexual commands are subsequently rejected by a young waiter she previously ridiculed with her friend, leaving her with a sense of shame and disillusionment, sentiments of powerlessness ruthlessly framed within an economy of exploitation.

Seidl forces us to stare prejudice and venality directly in the eye (as Teresa constantly demands of her love interests during foreplay) and know that while human beings walk this Earth, it will never go away. Some of the visual metaphors are extremely blunt – ravenous crocodiles at feeding time, a beach segregated by race and class – but they all intricately executed.

Paradise: Love contrasts rigidly formal fixed-camera establishing shots of Teresa in Austria with handheld camerawork showing her at the resort, depicting the frenzy of urban Kenya as much as Teresa's state of mind. (The static compositions' absolute symmetry is unnatural, almost absurd; the shots sometimes resemble unwitting parodies of a Thomas Struth photograph.) At times, the formalism is consonant with the narrative content, other times considerably less so.

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it's an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

Seidl's unblinking perspective can seem cruel... but this is Seidl at his most powerful and humane, in a Diane Arbus kind of way, bringing us intimately close to characters movies otherwise exclude... Seidl's unblinking perspective can seem cruel—Tiesel and the rest of the film's lunging Euro Moms have no secrets from us—but this is Seidl at his most powerful and humane, in a Diane Arbus kind of way, bringing us intimately close to characters movies otherwise exclude.

The importance of Tiesel's performance here can't be overstated, and even during what is easily the most excruciating birthday-party scene involving cock ribbons ever, the actor lends an incredibly profound sense of sorrow to the film's pitilessness. Love is the first part of a trilogy, the other entries being Faith and Hope; it's a tribute to Tiesel's ray of humanity that this chapter underlines its subtitle while still getting its unflinching message across.

Paradise: Love is surprisingly less nuanced, even if less dramatic, than Cantet's film, as it often seems more intent on spelling out its awareness of the politics involved than in lingering on the aching human engaged in the libidinal transactions. The dialogue sometimes rings forced (one white woman says, "The locals like everything that's natural and untamed"), and the narrative too episodic, even rushed in its desire to establish its point.

It's surprising how innocent much of Paradise: Love feels. Seidl's meticulous compositions have always reminded me a bit of Buster Keaton's, and here, he comes closer to G-rated comedy than I ever expected him to.

Racial clichés are celebrated in exuberant and discomforting ways, as when a bartender's complexion is described to be "as shiny as bacon rind." But that gaze turns both ways, and what once seemed like a bit of giddy satire on cultural stereotypes (overweight, middle-aged sex tourists getting their groove back) turns into an intimate commentary on the ugliness of economic disparity.

The difficulty with the film is not that these two tendencies are somehow incompatible. In fact, Paradise: Love is a relatively successful film in many respects. The problem is that Seidl's method requires that the film inculcate empathy for both sides of its political equation (colonial tourist / colonized, resistant subject) even as they both engage in patently reprehensible behavior.

In a superbly sustained and staged closing sequence when the corpulent gals try play a contest to see who can get one of the "Negroes" (as the subtitles... astonishingly state) to get it up first. The sequence encapsulates Seidl's challenge to his audience, which is to make sense of women turning men into their playthings and performing as the sexually dominant partner, yet at the same time acknowledging that these women are playing out the age-old roles of European occupier of African space...