The triptych “Paradise” is probably still the most famous thing shot by the controversial Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. With the first part of the trilogy, which was subtitled “Love”, Seidl presented himself at Cannes, and he imagined this trilogy as parallel stories about three women from one family who will find themselves in equally extreme situations. And all these films were designed to shock the audience and all these films caused considerable controversy, especially “Love” in which we have a handful of scenes of explicit sex. All three films have in common that the subtitles suggest what the main protagonists understand as paradise and how they imagine it.
In “Love”, 50-year-old Austrian divorcee Teresa (Margarete Tiesel) goes on vacation to Kenya. And very quickly it becomes clear to us why she arrived on vacation in Africa. A lonely woman who doesn’t look like Hollywood actresses in the fifties, but like average women her age, obviously has a distorted view of love and headed to Africa for romance. Other Austrian women of her age who are also staying there will immediately start persuading her to find a black man as soon as possible, and Teresa will listen to her advice and find a young Kenyan, thinking that she could develop a slightly deeper relationship with him than the classic transactional chatter of those ten days. .
However, very soon Teresa will realize that there is nothing in vain, and that her new boyfriend has a rather different view of love than her. “Paradise: Love” is a naturalistic dark humor drama in which Seidl satirizes today’s tourism and the way Westerners view these third world countries when they visit them as tourists. To that still colonizing view that everything there is for sale, that everything can be bought with money and that everything is allowed there. That’s how countless of those young blacks stand behind the fence on the beach and try to sell mostly fat and old tourists from Europe some trinkets, when in fact it’s their way of selling themselves. Teresa may seem naive at first, like a woman with problems in life and at work who may have really imagined the trip to Africa as an opportunity to find a new love in her life after apparently countless disappointments.
She will understand how it all works there by the end of the summer vacation, and we will also understand that it is not only Westerners who exploit and try to take advantage of what is offered to them, but also that the local population has accepted the rules of the game even when they are already condemned to they have to sell, they try to get as much as possible out of that situation. This shocking and controversial film seems grotesque from beginning to end, all the more so because it is all so authentic, naturalistic, almost on the level of a documentary. Everything we see is equally masterful, so precisely struck, clever and realistic, yet at the same time repulsive and disgusting.