Sex tourism has been around for centuries but it really started to flourish in the 1800s. I used to think it was only men with money that traveled to poorer regions in Asia, South America and the Philippines to have sex with underage girls but some women are also avid sex tourists. Heading South (2005), directed by Laurent Cantet, was one of the first movies to dramatize this activity with Charlotte Rampling playing a well-to-do Bostonian who enjoys cavorting with the young black gigolos of Haiti during her annual vacation. Although it was unusually frank and edgy at the time, it almost looks subtle next to Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies: Liebe (English title: Paradise: Love, 2012), the first in the Austrian filmmaker’s “Paradise” trilogy. In this film, Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), n overweight fifty-year-old woman with a sullen teenage daughter, takes a solo holiday at a beach resort in Kenya (It was filmed at the Flamingo Beach Hotel in Mombasa). Besides enjoying the sun and surf, her prime objective is to join her Austrian friend Inge (Inge Maux) in a series of sexual escapades with young African men. Of course, it costs money – sex tourism in Kenya is a booming business – but Teresa is looking for something more than just casual sex.
When the film opens, we see Teresa at work. She is overseeing a recreational outing for a group of mentally disabled adults. They are engaged in a fast and furious game of bumper cars and Seidi stages this is a way that alternates between striking static compositions and frenetic hand-held action shots, something that has become part of his visual aesthetic and invites comparisons to the work of photographer Diane Arbus and painter Lucien Freud in terms of portraiture.
Once Teresa arrives in Kenya, she is quickly educated by her friend Inge on how to navigate and enjoy the local rent boy situation.
Inge: “You have to smell their skin. It’s incredible.”
Teresa: “Whose skin?”
Inge: “The Negroes. It smells of coconut. I could lick and bite them forever.”
The women talk about the beach hustlers as if they are exotic fruit but, in a way, they are disposable products for the women. They can pay for their sexual services and discard them at will as if the men are little more than human dildos or sex aids. But just who is exploiting who in Paradise: Love? The women may be on the hunt but their prey know how to drain their bank accounts. It starts with selling the women jewelry, novelties, moves on to escorted tours of the area and usually ends up at a cheap hotel room (the woman always pays). Then come the requests for more money – a sick father is in the hospital, a brother was in a motorcycle wreck, a family member can’t pay their bills, etc. It becomes an endless cycle with the female tourists and the hustlers taking turns playing exploiter and exploited.
Teresa quickly becomes wise to the native con game after being taken advantage of by Gabriel (Gabriel Mwarua) and tries to remain aloof from the begging hordes. But when Munga (Peter Kazungu), one of the local men, chases away his rivals and allows Teresa to enjoy the beach in private, she begins to trust him. As they spend more time together, her feelings for him grow but she wants more than just a sexual arrangement. “You have to be gentle. I’m not an animal,” she lectures him after he gropes her breasts. Then she reveals her ultimate desire. She wants him to look into her eyes and see the real Teresa inside, not the middle-aged woman with crows feet around her eyes, sagging breasts and flabby buttocks. A real human connection is lacking and it will remain allusive for Teresa and any woman who expects real passion and affection in exchange for money.
Seidl entered the Austrian film industry as a documentarian and Paradise: Love is a unique mixture of fiction and docudrama using mostly non-professional actors in improvised situations. Only Teresa and a few other roles are played by established actors but Seidl’s cool, detached approach avoids judging the on-screen characters and their actions. That responsibility falls to the viewer who can navigate the narrative using their own moral compass. This is where Seidl’s films become polarizing for audiences – you are either shocked and offended by what he shows or you can observe it as a realistic reflection of human life despite its grim or despairing depiction.
It must be said that Margarete Tiesel gives a raw, fearless performance as Teresa and her sex scenes with the Kenya men accent the difference between the men’s firm, muscular physiques and her abundantly fleshy, out of shape body. Some detractors have criticized the film for being exploitive and demeaning but what some viewers find too explicit looks like the work of a sociologist to me.
In an interview with Dustin Chang of Screen Anarchy, Seidl stated, “In all my films, sex and relationship to bodies are very important. I am always interested in looking behind the façade because the world we are living in is flooded with images by media which paints [a] completely distorted picture from our true selves. If we look at ourselves in the mirror, what we see is very different from the images in the media. For me it’s very important to look at and present reality.”
And reality in the films of Ulrich Seidl can often look bleak and ugly but there are moments of beauty too, especially in some of the formal compositions of dual cinematographers Wolfgang Thaler and Edward Lachman –a line of beach vendors waiting anxiously outside the barrier rope of the resort, a water ballet of women and resort employees in the hotel pool, Munga lying beside the Rubenesque body of Teresa in their mosquito net enclosed bed.
Still, Paradise: Love is difficult to watch at times. There are plenty of squirm-inducing moments and a final scene in which a young Kenya boy is used like a sex toy by Teresa and her girlfriends ends in humiliation for the native and anger and disappointment for the female tourists (they are unable to make his penis hard). In the end, it is hard not to feel sadness about the human behavior on display in the film, which is not the same thing as liking any of the characters. In fact, Josphat (Josphat Hamisi), the friendly, sweet-natured bartender at Teresa’s resort, might be the only real sympathetic character.
Teresa may initially come across as naïve and somewhat likable but her callousness and racist attitudes soon emerge, especially in a scene where she and Inge persuade Josphat to repeat some words in German and then laugh uproariously at his awkward pronunciation. In another scene Teresa lives up to the noxious tourist stereotype when she snaps a close-up photo of Munga’s penis – a digital souvenir of her trip – while he sleeps.
Seidl began making documentary films in 1984 and achieved a major artistic breakthrough with Animal Love (1996), a disturbing portrait of socially maladjusted people with unhealthy relationships with their pets. The director moved into fictionalized docu-dramas with Models (1999) but Import Export (2007) was a major breakthrough, introducing him to international audiences.
Paradise: Love was nominated for the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival but critics have been divided over its merits. On the pro side are A.O. Scott of The New York Times who called it,“a tour de force of meticulous cruelty, a comic melodrama that elicits laughter and empathy and then replaces those responses with squirming discomfort.” And Jessica Kiang of The Playlist wrote, “Challenging, complex and frequently ugly, Paradise: Love is a ruthless exploration of how unlike our everyday selves we can behave when we’re “on holiday,” and how much that illuminates who we really are.”
Among the negative reviews were Farran Smith Nehme of The New York Post who stated, “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.” Mark Olsen of The Hollywood Reporter called it, “Superficially provocative but ultimately pointless, this is one punishing vacation.”
My only reservations about Paradise: Love are its inflated length – 120 minutes – and a tendency toward repetition as Teresa falls into a pattern of ritualistic behavior, which doesn’t add depth to her characterization. The film might also have been more insightful if it showed any of the Kenya men in their private lives when they weren’t hustling the tourists. But that would have been a different movie from Seidl’s conception.
Seidl followed Paradise: Love with two more installments in the trilogy; Paradise: Peace (2012), in which Teresa’s sister Anne Marie (Marie Hofstatter) spends her spare time doing missionary work in immigrant neighborhoods in Vienna, and Paradise: Hope (2013), which depicts the experiences of Teresa’s daughter Melanie (Melanie Lenz) at a diet camp for overweight teenage girls.
In an interview with Karin Schieder for Austrian Films.com, Seidl explained that, “The Paradise trilogy contains three stories about the desires of three individuals who are searching for something to fulfill their dreams, which in turn are related to our society. Teresa’s at an age where it’s difficult for her to find a man, because she just doesn’t match the conventional ideas about beauty anymore. The film’s also about the market value of beauty standards that are preached to us day in and day out.” For anyone interested in the work of Ulrich Seidl, the Paradise trilogy is probably the best entry point but his unique brand of cinematic miserabilism isn’t for everyone.
Paradise: Love was released on DVD by Strand Home Video in August 2013 with no extra features but you can also stream it on various digital platforms such as Prime and Tubi.
Other links of interest:
https://www.austrianfilms.com/news/en/ulrich_seidl_talks_about_paradise_love
https://watershed.co.uk/archive-sites/seidl/resources/index.html
http://thirdrailquarterly.org/jonathan-thomas-ulrich-seidl/
https://bampfa.org/program/lonely-place-films-ulrich-seidl
Cinema Sojourns 