Paradies: Liebe (2012)
Paradise: Love (2012)
DVDRip | AVI | 704 x 384 | XviD @ 1459 Kbps | 120 min | 1,61 Gb
Audio: German AC3 5.1 @ 448 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama
DVDRip | AVI | 704 x 384 | XviD @ 1459 Kbps | 120 min | 1,61 Gb
Audio: German AC3 5.1 @ 448 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama
Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise: Love" is hardly the first film to explore the world of wealthy women and the young studs… who service them; it's not even the first to do it in a sex-tourism context, having been beaten to the punch by 2006's "Heading South." But it sure as hell is the dirtiest. Full of explicit sex that will restrict it to niche distribution in only the most tolerant territories, it challenges auds throughout on a multitude of levels. Repulsive and sublimely beautiful, arguably celebratory and damning of its characters, it's hideous and masterful all at once, "Salo" with sunburn.
IMDB
The U.K. premiere of Paradise: Love, the first of controversial Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’sParadise Trilogy, stars Margarete Tiesel as Teresa, an overweight, middle-aged, single mother on her first trip to a Kenyan beach resort. She’s initiated into the local culture by her experienced female companion. The main attraction of which is the sexual prowess of the local men, who loiter beyond the resort’s strictly patrolled beach. Naive and self-conscious, Teresa enters into sexual encounters looking for love but finds humiliation and well-rehearsed cons. Bruised but undeterred Teresa embraces her liberation as a “sugar mama,” hardening to the trade with each new lover.
Veronika Franz’s script constantly shifts our sympathies between the self-conscious, aging, and lonely women, who have spent their life caring for others, and the impoverished Kenyans’ need to feed their families. The beautiful saturated cinematography, by Edward Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler, references the monumental nudes of artists like Jenny Saville or Lucien Freud in lingering shots of the sexual exchanges that challenge the viewers to confront attitudes to aging and sexual commodification.
Margarete Tiesel is outstanding as Teresa, but all the performances are incredibly brave. In a painful scene of self-denial, Teresa tries to teach a lover the heartfelt sensuality she desperately desires but cannot buy. In another, after holiday friends deliver a young Kenyan to Teresa’s room to dance for her birthday, the sexual scene that plays out is truly shocking, turning from hilarity to pity and degradation.
The film becomes excruciating as unrelenting scenes mount up with Seidl pondering the question of “who’s exploiting who?” Complex and uncompromising Paradise: Love is by turns blackly comic, deeply tragic, and downright offensive. It provides no easy answers and resonates long after viewing. One of the most impressive and intense films of 2012, it also delivers a caustic critique of global consumer capitalism. Paradise: Love opens across Europe this autumn and will be released by Strand Releasing in the U.S. Paradise: Faith screened at Venice, and Paradise: Hope is scheduled for completion in 2013.
Paradies: Liebe (2012)
