Paradise: Love

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Paradise: Love was one of the most unremittingly depressing and soulless movies I've ever seen. While it might have worked as a documentary, it didn't work at all as fiction. I knew the movie was in trouble when in the opening scene, the camera seemed to gawk and leer at a group of Down Syndrome individuals riding bumper cars. This set the tone for the movie; it seemed to operate from the premise the simply portraying misery and dehumanization is in itself art. Not so. There were hardly any real human interactions in the movie, and as a result nothing redemptive about it. Even the sex itself was presented oddly; we saw numerous awkward and unfulfilled moments, but we never saw Teresa enjoy her encounters for even a second. After all, something kept her going back. The movie was so heavy-handed, so focused on exploitation, it couldn't allow even a second of joy to break through. I thought that at the end, the director might offer some uplift by showing Teresa back in Austrian with a new appreciation for her humdrum job and her slacker daughter, but that was way too much to ask. At the movie's end we see her walking on the beach, lonely and morose. A good movie may leave you feeling melancholy, but it always leaves you feeling more human and enriched. This movie was the antithesis of that. As much as I didn't like this movie, I'm sure the Kenyan board of tourism liked it even less!

This is a very sad movie. It explores some of the worst sides of human nature, I should say. To begin with, I can sympathize with Theresa, because her longing for love and sex, although she has become too old and fat for Western European men - is after all a natural thing. I feel sorry for her, when the African men only try to suck her out of more and more money, in a completely shameless way. But then Theresa also changes into someone harder, who does not expect love anymore but just seeks sex on her own terms. She is getting ruthless, and in the end - and in the company of her women friends who are the same - she can even treat a very young man, almost a boy, as if he was some kind of animal... By then she has lost me, and I feel an equal disgust against the Western women and the African men, customers and sellers in the sex trade, alike. I have also lost all desire to visit Africa South of Sahara, ever... The photo is very bleak and dark, and it does not seem very professional. But maybe this is intentional - to make it look more like a documentary or a reality show? I think it would have been more entertaining with Hollywood standard on the photo and filming, though. This is not a movie that you should watch if you are already depressed and have doubts about the human race... And absolutely not in the company of children or teenagers, as there is a lot of nudity here and sex showed in an unpleasant way - the opposite of romantic. But if you want to learn something about what your sister, mother, colleague or friend might have been up to on her "cultural" tour of Gambia or Kenya... you might give it a go!