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Paradise: Love Reviews

Although the way the story is told makes it slow and repetitive, the interesting thing about Paradise: Love is that it shows a different and most sincere perspective on loneliness and the need to feel loved. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 13, 2023

What Seidl achieves here is truly commendable. But dang, it's one of the saddest movies I've ever seen.

Full Review | Feb 24, 2021

Capturing complex themes such as desire to find love, body image, human objectification, and racial exploitation, Paradise: Love is a powerful watch.

Full Review | Jun 22, 2019

Somehow manages to remain as enthralling as it is excruciating, despite its languid pace.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 26, 2019

Here, each shot tells a story, silent cinema style, and Seidl's cinema resembles the railroad-like cinema construction of the silents. Yet he is not just presentational; this presentation confronts...

Full Review | Nov 16, 2017

A challenging and frequently uncomfortable watch that messes with your sympathies.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 5, 2017

The film is attuned to the moral complexity of the situation, and also surprisingly tender.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2017

Even as he critiques the social dynamic, Seidl is never less than humane, spending serious time loitering with marginalized characters no other filmmaker deems worthy of time.

Full Review | Apr 12, 2016

A film that, once watched, is not readily un-watched, in both good and dismaying ways alike.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 10, 2014

Watching Paradise: Love is a visceral, Schadenfreude-tinged experience that produces belly laughs and queasiness alike-sometimes in tandem.

Full Review | Nov 4, 2013

A poignant film about the desperation of tubby, middle-aged Austrian women who take a sex tour to Kenya.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 3, 2013

This cleverly made film is often painful to watch since we understand from the start where it's heading, so we watch helplessly as the lead character is warped by her yearning for love.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 20, 2013

The problem is not with the hopelessness of Seidl's vision, it is with the predictability of the tonal arc.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 14, 2013

Some will feel too uncomfortable watching this but there's an ironic humour there too ...

The result is overlong but still offers a clear-eyed engagement with a Kenya where love is a transaction and the heart remains a lonely hunter.

The double-edged irony of the title is your first hint: this is a clever pitch-black satire that often feels like a cruel joke.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 14, 2013

Roll on Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope!

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 13, 2013

Moralists and the missionarily inclined will go "Tsk, tsk, how degrading." That seems to be Seidl's attitude, though he sidles up to it archly and pruriently.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 13, 2013

Though it covers similar thematic ground to Laurent Cantet's Haiti-set Heading South, Seidl's gruelling film proves his knack for leaving viewers emotionally discomfited.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 11, 2013

Sugar Mama sex tourism is the subject of Paradise Love, and director Ulrich Seidl's remarkable film about the subject is deeply affecting in a number of ways.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 10, 2013

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Movie Reviews

In 'paradise,' pursuing something less than love.

Mark Jenkins

Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) travels to a beach resort in Kenya for vacation, where she dabbles in sex tourism with a series of local men. Strand Relesasing hide caption

Paradise: Love

Director: Ulrich Seidl
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 120 minutes

Not rated; nudity, explicit sexual scenes and drug use

Language: German, Swahili and English, with English subtitles

With: Margarethe Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux

The opening sequence of Paradise: Love doesn't really have anything to do with what follows, but it does establish director Ulrich Seidl's unflinching eye. At a pavilion somewhere in Austria, a group of cognitively challenged children, many apparently with Down syndrome, ride bumper cars under the supervision of Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel). There's no hint of sentimentality, no attempt at reassurance.

In fact Teresa, a corpulent middle-aged divorcee with a surly teenage daughter, clearly needs a vacation — and the Alps or the Baltic won't do. After a consult with a hedonistic pal, Inge (Inge Maux), Teresa heads for a Kenyan resort to enjoy the attentions of the well-built young men who line up just beyond the ropes claiming most of the hotel's beach for paying guests only.

Co-written by Seidl and his regular collaborator Veronika Franz, Paradise: Love is startlingly frank if narratively underdeveloped. It picks up the theme of the filmmaker's 2007 Import/Export , in which characters cross between East and West — specifically between Austria and Ukraine — in search of work. This time, he observes a North-South transaction, with only one side in it for the money.

The tourists don't exactly hire the locals, yet the subject of cash soon arises, sometimes subtly but often not. As in Heading South , French director Laurent Cantet's 2005 film on the same subject, older women use their financial power to replace faded sexual allure. The men rely on physical beauty — and don't necessarily bother to be charming.

While the women are more interested in niceties, they can be condescending and even racist. Before hitting the beach, Teresa and a friend cackle while insisting that a bartender parrot the German names of foodstuffs whose shininess reminds them of his skin.

Then it's time for more carnal pursuits. The first gigolo Teresa encounters is too abrupt, and she flees. She's happier with the dreadlocked Munga (nonprofessional actor Peter Kuzungu), who's gentler and never asks for anything for himself. (He does, it will transpire, have an intriguingly large number of relatives who need urgent medical care.)

It might seem that, once she becomes disillusioned with Munga, Teresa would have had enough of the hustle. But she keeps pursuing her notion of a holiday romance until a raunchy scene with a male stripper — echoing one with a female prostitute in Import/Export — reveals the hopelessness of her quest.

Teresa's doggedness parallels the movie's own. Paradise: Love would be more compelling if it had a second act in which either its protagonist or one of her boy toys came to some sort of realization. Instead, Seidl's strategy is to reiterate and escalate, which is finally more exhausting than illuminating. If nothing else, the film's second half proves Tiesel's daring and dedication as an actor.

The director has a background in documentary, where he developed instincts that serve him well. Strikingly photographed by Wolfgang Thaler and Ed Lachman, who also shot Import/Export , the movie includes some striking real-world sequences. When Teresa and her giggly friends go to watch crocodiles at feeding time, it's a metaphor for voraciousness that also works as sheer exotic spectacle.

Partially improvised, Paradise: Love began as movie about three female relatives on separate (and disparate) vacations. It snowballed into a trilogy, with the forthcoming Paradise: Faith (about a missionary) and Paradise: Hope (about a diet camp) as separate films.

Perhaps those installments will be shapelier, with stronger resolutions to their premises. But it's unlikely that they'll be more audacious than this exploration of European sex tourism.

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Review: Ulrich Seidl’s ‘Paradise: Love’ A Difficult But Provocative Watch With An Astounding Central Performance

Jessica kiang.

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Black/white, rich/poor, fat/thin, female/male, old/young — these are just a few of the dichotomies explored in the first of the ‘ Paradise ‘ trilogy from Austrian director Ulrich Seidl . Our chronology is a bit messed up, since we already reviewed (very favorably) the second entry “ Paradise: Faith ” out of Venice , but having missed ‘ Love ’ in Cannes , we were happy to catch up with it at a very packed screening at the Göteborg International Film Festival earlier this year. Perhaps “happy” is the wrong word: “Paradise: Love” proved a frequently uncomfortable and rather overlong watch, but we still came away profoundly impressed and not a little troubled by the questions it raises, and the unflinching, uncompromising way in which it does so.

So, an occasionally punishing tale of social and personal humiliations and injustices from an Austrian director? So far, so Haneke . But if the directors share a certain detachment, Haneke’s coolness feels more mental and psychological, while Seidl here deals in the corporeal, making his film an altogether fleshier affair. We should mention that the flesh most frequently the subject of Seidl’s dispassionate but obsessive camera, is that of Margarete Tiesel as lead character Teresa, whose body, overweight, aging and overflowing in a series of unflattering bikinis and beach wear, is simply not one we’re used to seeing so graphically represented on our screens. There is no doubt that’s where some of the discomfort comes from on the part of the viewer, and it is one of the quandaries that the picture explores: if the sex scenes featured nubile, smooth-skinned pretty things engaging in this behaviour, be it degrading to one or either party, would we have such a distaste for it? At least part of our reaction to these scenes is not just intellectual or moral (because A is exploiting B, along racial, cultural or sexual lines), but visceral.

Not only that, but many of the humiliations and degradations with which we are presented are remarkable for being perpetrated on men by women. A particularly striking and gruelling (for the viewer) example is a scene in which four white women hire a black male stripper/rent boy and challenge each other to get him hard. His complicity in his own utter objectification (not just as a man, but explicitly as a black man) is degrading, but our revulsion toward the scene is also colored by the fact it’s female-on-male. We’ve seen similar or equivalent scenes of women being sexually exploited by (often older, less attractive) men elsewhere many times before, and it’s never exactly a lark, but the reversal of power here definitely adds another layer of shock value. It’s not an original point — that, even subconsciously, we hold women and men to different standards — but having it demonstrated so forcefully and at such length did give us pause.

Teresa, who works with the mentally disabled and is mother to a sullen teenage girl (who will herself be the subject of ‘ Hope ,’ the forthcoming concluding chapter of the ‘Paradise’ trilogy), takes a holiday to Kenya with a friend to celebrate her birthday. In the resort they meet some other white, German-speaking women who are all more or less up-front about the reason for their trip there: sex with young, athletic local Kenyans. A little squeamish at first, Teresa finds she cannot reconcile herself to the tawdriness of a purely transactional encounter, and instead hopes, futilely, for a sexual relationship not based on money. She is looking for love, of a sort, or at least to be desired by one of the smooth-talking, smooth-bodied young locals for the person she is, spare tire, sagging boobs and all. She appears blind to the hypocrisy, racism and cultural ignorance of this unattainable dream, and of her behaviour in chasing it. Gradually disillusioned, her behaviour becomes more overtly unpleasant and selfish, leading to a bitterness aimed both inwards and outwards: her birthday party culminates in two separate instances of appalling sex tourism/exploitation, before we leave her, unfulfilled and sobbing with self-pity and self-loathing, partially clad on her hotel bed.

No, we don’t like Teresa much, but she is an astonishingly real character, and first-timer Tiesel’s performance, brought out by Seidl’s part-scripted, part-improvisational process, is a small miracle. Not just because of the absolute lack of vanity or artifice in how she allows her heavy, flabby body to be shot and mauled and manhandled, but also in refusing to soften or sweeten her characterisation to make it more palatable. We don’t understand why this performance has not received more attention — whatever one’s issues with the film, her commitment is total and devastating in its unsentimentality.

“Paradise: Love” is a hard film to like and an even harder film to unpack, it’s so loaded with layers of -isms. And perhaps it doesn’t have a huge amount to contribute to the discourse around any one of the issues it touches on. Still, over its somewhat excessive running time, it’s to its credit that we found ourselves compelled to ask some uncomfortable questions not just of the characters, but of our relationship to them and their representation. 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. [B+]

This is a reprint of our review from the Göteborg International Film Festival.

Paradise: Love

Teresa, a fifty-year-old Austrian mother, travels to the paradise of the beaches of Kenya, seeking out love from African boys. But she must confront the hard truth that on the beaches of Ken... Read all Teresa, a fifty-year-old Austrian mother, travels to the paradise of the beaches of Kenya, seeking out love from African boys. But she must confront the hard truth that on the beaches of Kenya, love is a business. Teresa, a fifty-year-old Austrian mother, travels to the paradise of the beaches of Kenya, seeking out love from African boys. But she must confront the hard truth that on the beaches of Kenya, love is a business.

Ulrich Seidl
Veronika Franz
Margarete Tiesel
Peter Kazungu
31 User reviews
111 Critic reviews
65 Metascore
4 wins & 7 nominations

(as Margarethe Tiesel)
Freundin von Teresa
Urlaubsfreundinnen
(as Gabriel Nguma Mwaruwa)
(as Carlos Mukutani)

Tochter Teresa

Schwester Teresa
Schwester Munga
Freund Inge Maux
Autodromfahrer
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Paradise: Liebe is the first installment in Seidl's Paradise trilogy, a project first conceived as one film with three parallel stories. The other two films in the trilogy are Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope.
Connections Featured in Pauw & Witteman: Episode #7.65 (2013)

User reviews 31

cinematic_aficionado
Jun 22, 2013
How long is Paradise: Love? Powered by Alexa
April 26, 2013 (United States)
Official site (Austria)
Official site (Japan)
Paradies: Liebe
Flamingo Beach Hotel, Mombasa, Kenya
Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion GmbH
Coproduction Office
See more company credits at IMDbPro
€3,600,000 (estimated)
Apr 28, 2013

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours
Dolby Digital

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Paradise: Love

Repulsive and sublimely beautiful, arguably celebratory and damning of its characters, "Paradise: Love" is hideous and masterful all it once, "Salo" with sunburn.

By Leslie Felperin

Leslie Felperin

Film Review: ‘Traitors’ 11 years ago
Venice Film Review: ‘Little Brother’ 11 years ago
Venice Film Review: ‘Ukraine Is Not a Brothel’ 11 years ago

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.

Popular on Variety

Sticking to his opaque M.O. (apparent in his features “Dog Days” and “Import/Export,” as well as his many docus), Seidl refrains from passing overt moral judgment on his characters. But it feels as though he can’t bear to look away from what they get up to, or to forsake hard-won footage from what was reportedly a difficult shoot.

A visually bravura opening sequence, completely extraneous to the rest of the film, features seemingly single protagonist Teresa (legit thesp Margarethe Tiesel, fearless) overseeing a gaggle of people with Down Syndrome riding bumper cars in Austria. Thereafter, Teresa drops off her mopey tween daughter (Melanie Lenz), in the ‘burbs with her sister (Maria Hofstaetter, “Import/Export”) and heads to a Kenyan resort that seems to cater particularly to ladies of a certain age.

There, Teresa befriends another Austrian woman (Inge Maux), who enthusiastically extols the pleasures of young African men’s flesh. Judging by the frequent tableau shots of young men patiently, eerily waiting on the beach, there’s no shortage of guys here willing to offer goods for sale, be they trinkets or their own bodies.

At first hesitant, and adamant that she’s looking for a relationship at least, Teresa beds a sexually aggressive young man, Gabriel (Gabriel Nguma Mwarua), then the mellower Munga (Peter Kazungu). Although she’s initially won over by Munga’s show of reticence and declarations of ardor, after some time (the holiday seems to last for weeks), his requests for money to help his impoverished family become more brazenly avaricious. Eventually, Teresa and her friends stop pretending that what they’re doing is anything other than paying for sex, culminating in a grueling sequence in which her friends (Dunja Sowinetz, Helen Brugat and Maux) hire a male stripper/hustler (Anderson Mutisya) to celebrate Teresa’s birthday.

Pic puts the women’s flesh, some of it very abundant, right out on display, daring viewers to recoil from their obesity. In a cleverly pre-emptive scene (largely improvised, as are all the sequences here), the women themselves discuss their own disgust with their bodies, decrying their fat, their troublesome pubic hair and the inexorable effects of age and gravity.

What’s attractive about the Kenyan men is not just their beautiful, athletic bodies, but their willingness to make these women feel desirable once again. As the film progresses, Teresa’s dresses get shorter, and she fairly crackles with self-confident erotic energy. In one cheeky composition, Seidl even arranges Tiesel in a post-coital pose that evokes Manet’s painting “Olympia.”

What’s in play here is not some facile celebration of middle-aged female desire. The Austrian women’s empowerment is still, like all sex for hire, ultimately about power, specifically financial power, and as such forms a microcosm of international relations. This is post-colonialism in all its filthy glory, mutual exploitation that debases all involved.

Some will feel troubled that we’re given no access to any of the Africans’ inner thoughts; they’re all just out for a buck, any way they can make it. But it’s perhaps admirable that Seidl doesn’t give them overwrought speeches to justify their actions; the grinding poverty they live in is right there onscreen for anyone to see, and in their own way, they’re more honest than the Europeans they service. (The Kenyan actors here are non-pros whose roles are informed by firsthand experience.)

Lensed by Seidl’s longstanding collaborator Wolfgang Thaler as well as Ed Lachman (who worked with Seidl on “Import/Export”), the pic interlaces exquisitely composed static shots — with the figures placed just so in the lower half of the frame, crowned by lots of space overhead — and sinuous Steadicam work. The soundtrack is also a treat, featuring a mix of Eurodisco and African pop music, always sourced by the action.

Austria-Germany-France

Production: An Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion production, in co-production with Tat Film, Parisienne de Production, with the support of Oesterreichisches Filminstitut, Filmfonds Wien, Land Niederoesterreich, Eurimages, CNC, in collaboration with ORF, WDR/Arte, Degeto, Arte France. (International sales: the Co-Production Office, Paris.) Produced by Ulrich Seidl. Directed by Ulrich Seidl. Screenplay, Seidl, Veronika Franz.
Crew: Camera (color, 16mm), Wolfgang Thaler, Ed Lachman; editor, Christof Schertenleib; art director, Renate Martin, Andreas Donhauser; costume designer, Tanja Hausner; sound (Dolby Digital), Ekkehart Baumung; casting, Eva Roth. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 17, 2012. Running time: 120 MIN.
With: With: Margarethe Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux, Dunja Sowinetz, Helen Brugat, Gabriel Nguma Mwarua, Josphat Hamisi, Carlos Mkutano, Maria Hofstaetter, Melanie Lenz, Anderson Mutisya. (German, English, Swahili dialogue)

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Film review: Paradise: Love - Ulrich Seidl's unsparing inquiry into sex tourism in Kenya

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A middle-aged woman seeks companionship in sunny climes, but Shirley Valentine this isn't.

The first part of a trilogy by Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl, Love is an unsparing inquiry into sex tourism in Kenya, where it pays to realise that every exchange is an economic one. Teresa (Margarete Tiesel) is a 50-year-old seeking a young black man who will see past her "crow's feet and fat bum" to her yearning soul.

She seems to connect with Munga (Peter Kazungu), until he fleeces her for cash. Seidl's camera-gaze is pitiless, though he locates a wintry humour beneath the palm trees.

What the film so excruciatingly describes is how the transaction between seller and purchaser demeans both parties. It makes for a dispiriting couple of hours.

The other two films in the trilogy are to be "Faith" and "Hope", and I'm sort of dreading them even now.

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Paradise: love, paradies: liebe.

Directed by Ulrich Seidl

On the beaches of Kenya they’re known as "Sugar Mamas" —European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise, moving from beach to beach.

Margarethe Tiesel Peter Kazungu Inge Maux Dunja Sowinetz Helen Brugat Carlos Mkutano Gabriel Mwarua Josphat Hamisi Anderson Mutisya Maria Hofstätter Melanie Lenz

Director Director

Ulrich Seidl

Producers Producers

Ulrich Seidl Christine Ruppert Philippe Bober

Writers Writers

Ulrich Seidl Veronika Franz

Casting Casting

Editor editor.

Christof Schertenleib

Cinematography Cinematography

Edward Lachman Wolfgang Thaler

Production Design Production Design

Andreas Donhauser Renate Martin

Costume Design Costume Design

Tanja Hausner

Société Parisienne de Production Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion Tatfilm

Austria France Germany

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

German English Swahili

Releases by Date

27 apr 2012, 03 jan 2013, 14 feb 2013, 16 may 2013, 14 jun 2013, 16 aug 2013, 22 jun 2023, 27 jun 2013, releases by country.

Theatrical 16
Theatrical 18+
Theatrical Κ-18
Physical DVD
Theatrical 18

121 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 10

Hakuna matata.

Stunning stillness of contrasts: civilization and a natural paradise, youth and old age, black and white, German and Swahili, innocence and evil, and, most importantly, sexual drive vs. the need of human individuality recognition. Seidl is more reminiscent from minimalist auteurs than from Haneke himself, at least with this feature. There are traces of Lanthimos and Mendoza, but with a wonderful shifting between frozen frames and first POV tracking shots which fluctuations correlate with the mother's feelings. Her companions function as the role of the chorus in Sophocles' plays: speaking that which she feels but doesn't communicate openly.

Since the beginning, Seidl makes us think about how the races and people we see are not only social outcasts,…

Review by preston ★★★★ 5

Second viewing. Wasn't really planning to add more comments - but just a few SPOILER-laden notes to support (what seems to be) my minority opinion that it's one of the best films of the year:

1. The balance in this film is superb, best I've seen since Raja 10 years ago. Both sides exploit each other, and it's impossible to make any firm moral judgment. Teresa clearly exploits the Africans but in fact she's the sucker, not they. Hence e.g. the bit where she asks the man if he's going to have a problem being seen on the street with her - and he, surprised, replies that of course not, people will just assume she's got money. He tells her…

Review by Jack ★★★★ 2

Ulrich Seidl’s first entry in the Paradise trilogy is a deeply ponderous, unpleasant yet utterly sublime portrait of one’s desperation for love and the illusions of paradisiacal bliss. Set in the beaches of Kenya, Seidl plants a dejected woman searching for meaningful human connection in a place where sex is entirely transactional. It’s profoundly sad, framing the actors in a manner that displays their vulnerability in many unsparing ways. Cynical, uncomfortable, and so incredibly unique. Ulrich Seidl is a singular filmmaker!

Review by Viren ★★★★

(No) Paradise: (No) Love!

A bold and confronting portrayal of the harsh realities of sex tourism in Kenya. Ulrich Seidl's unapologetic approach make viewers face uncomfortable truths about privilege, control, and treating relationships like transactions.

' Paradise: Love ' makes us think about how we might be part of unfair systems. It makes us think about how people connect with each other and want to be happy. Even though it's about tough topics, the movie looks closely at love, who we are, and what we want in a changing world.

The movie makes us look at ourselves and how we think and act, even when it's hard. It's a movie that stays with you, making you think about love, strength, and what it means to be human long after it's over.

Review by becca ★★★★½

such a beautiful image of such an ugly thing

Review by Allison M. 🌱 @ Tribeca Festival ★½

Vegan alert: -Bacon rind -Blood sausage references

Review by Scott Tobias ★★★★ 2

A movie called Paradise anything from a scolding formalist like Ulrich Seidl is bound to be as proportionally miserablist as a movie called Happiness by Todd Solondz. And while, indeed, Seidl's tale of a desperately lonely fiftysomething Austrian woman visiting Kenya as a sex tourist is as brutal as it sounds, I was pleased by how much compassion Seidl extends both to the heroine and the desperate men with whom she cavorts—even though all parties are exploiting one another to varying degrees. This is the movie Laurent Cantet's terrible Heading South wanted to be, but where Cantet took constant potshots at arrogant white women in Haiti, Seidl isn't quite as severe toward his pasty Europeans, despite scene after scene of them saying vaguely (and not-so-vaguely) racist things and taking advantage of locals who are begging for schillings. It's characteristically blunt, but also gratifyingly artful and complex.

Review by Sehhaar ★★★

This is probably the least romantic film I've ever seen. I'd rather watch Gaspar Noe's entire filmography on a first date than this.

Review by nick ★★★★ 6

Paradise: Love is a relentlessly disturbing yet voyeuristically satisfactory work from Austrian director Ulrich Seidl. If you have seen Dog Days, you would have some ideas about Seidl's knacks for ultra realistic and controversial filmmaking targeted at middle class inertia. Here Seidl brought his niche to the highest order, bringing the set from a summer day Austrian neighborhood to a beautiful Kenyan coatal resort, where the same human tragedies happen on an even more atrocious level.

We are introduced to a white middle-aged Austrian woman Teresa who travels to the said beach in search of the Kenyan rent boys nearby, who will do anything just for a few dollars more. We see this Kenyan seaside town as a hotbed for…

Review by Sean Baker

Blu-ray - I was lucky enough to get the theatrical Blu-rays of the trilogy.

Review by Graham ★★★★

Loneliness is a global disease, and for 50 year old Teresa, her trip to Kenya is intended to provide a little respite. In a country of little wealth and an abundance of handsome young bucks though, it soon becomes clear that her love will come at a price.

Funny and visceral in its delivery, the first in Ulrich Seidl‘a Paradise trilogy feels like a weird mashup of Roy Andersson and Harmony Korine. Shifting from desperation through anxiety to moments of happiness and back again, Paradise: Love is a wonderfully well written study of the human condition as we get older.

Review by Lucas Barwenczik 1

Zwischen Afrika und Europa kann es keine Liebe geben. Die Trennlinien, die jetzt Teile eines Strandes zum Hoheitsgebiet der Weißen erklären, hat die Geschichte gezogen. Kein Paradies ohne Sündenfall.

Und wie in der Bibel folgt danach vor allem Scham. Hauptfigur Teresa, eine beleibte, fünfzigjährige Wienerin, macht Sex-Urlaub in Kenia. Sie umwirbt die Einheimischen auf der Suche nach Liebe, die bieten aber nur Sex und wollen Geld dafür. Ulrich Seidl zeigt mit diesem Verhältnis düster Bilder von Sklaverei und kolonialer Herrschaft. Tourismus ist für ihn eine Form von Prostitution, die ein dauerhaftes Abhängigkeitsverhältnis schafft.

Unangenehm und stellenweise verstörend, ein Antidot zu Weltmusik und Ethno-Erlebnis-Kultur, die genau so entmenschlichen, wie die düstersten Kapitel der Vergangenheit.

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Paradise: Love

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl ( Import/Export , Dog Days ) specializes in depictions of methodical cruelty, so a movie from him called Paradise: Love more or less tells viewers to abandon all hope. As it happens, Love is just the first chapter in Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, which was originally intended as a single epic film, but wound up being divided into three separate works. ( Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope have already made their festival premières, and will presumably be released later this year.) That’s probably just as well, really, since this introduction is punishing on its own; bottomless loneliness is its primary subject. For better and for worse—often simultaneously—few movies have been as unflinching about the ugly, heartbreaking ways human beings can mutually exploit one another for fun and/or profit.

Paradise: Love

3 out of 5 stars
Recommended

Time Out says

Twenty-three years ago, ‘Shirley Valentine’ suggested that an idyllic beach holiday can be all it takes for a neglected middle-aged woman to find herself. ‘Paradise: Love,’ the startling first part of a planned trilogy of female character studies from unhurried Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl , takes a rather less rosy view of the benefits of sun, sand and some local passing trade: its matronly, mild-mannered protagonist Teresa ( Margarete Tiesel ) winds up far more lost than found on the bone-coloured shores of Kenya.

Dwelling on a similar vein of sex tourism to that sampled by Charlotte Rampling in 2006’s ‘Heading South’, Seidl’s film is considerably more sexually explicit than that softcore provocation – if you’ve always wanted to see a young African Adonis in the clutches of four rotund European women of a certain age, you no longer have to scour certain specialised corners of the Internet – but has no intention of titillating its audience. Instead, ‘Paradise: Love’ amounts to a witty if psychologically pitiless test of our unspoken presumptions about age, race, class and gender, lingering on the kind of physiques and interactions that Hollywood has long taught us are not fit for general consumption, and calmly inviting us to ask ourselves why we want to look away from the screen when we do.

Tiesel keeps Teresa’s motivations courageously opaque throughout: after losing her nerve during her first encounter with one of her resort’s infinite escorts, she continues to seek it with one unhappy, money-draining tryst after another. It’s her doomed, obtuse, are-we-having-fun-yet gumption that lends a sincere note of heartbreak to Seidl’s otherwise exquisitely austere, calculatedly claustrophobic construction. At 120 minutes, the director perhaps luxuriates in our discomfort a little too long, but it’s still a relief to be on our side of the screen.

Release Details

Release date: Friday 14 June 2013
Duration: 120 mins

Cast and crew

Director: Ulrich Seidl
Screenwriter: Veronika Franz
Maria Hofstätter
Margarete Tiesel

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Paradise: Love review

The first in a trilogy of vacation movies from austrian auteur ulrich seidl.

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To be followed by Paradise: Faith (July) and Paradise: Hope (Aug), Love is the first in Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl’s trilogy tracking three women from the same middle-class family taking separate vacations.

Here, 50-year-old Teresa (Margarete Tiesel) heads to a beach resort in Kenya, where young black men are literally queuing up to offer their ‘services’ to white, female sex tourists.

Though it covers similar thematic ground to Laurent Cantet’s Haiti-set Heading South, Seidl’s gruelling film proves his knack for leaving viewers emotionally discomfited.

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Review: 'Paradise: Love'

The striking opening images of Ulrich Seidl's " Paradise: Love " would, in a normal movie, be disturbing enough to resonate through the entire picture. Honestly, by the time this Austrian journey through Kenyan sex tourism ended and I cried out for vat of extra strength Lysol in which to scrub my mind, they'd been shoved aside. It was only upon looking at my notes that I recalled the prologue, in which a group of the mentally disabled screamed in either glee or fear on Las Vegas-themed bumper cars, and I recognized how perfectly it summed up the film in just a few images.

In a Kubrickian group shot followed by extreme individual close-ups, mentally challenged faces howl directly in the lens. Are they exalted? Are they in pain? It's impossible to know, and the blank look of the ride technician is pure Kuleshov Effect. Is she repulsed? Is she bored? We'll soon learn she (Margarethe Tiesel) is the heroine of this film, and trying to understand just what the hell is going on inside her head is a struggle that will continue for the next two hours. Also, and perhaps more importantly, attempting to read the intention of Seidl's film will prove just as difficult.

Tiesel's Teresa, a single mother with a body type that does not conform to the standard Western notions of beauty, deposits her teenage daughter at her sister's and heads off for vacation. She's joining a friend at an African beach resort that caters to German-language tourists and appears to have a cavalier attitude to the wide array of freelance gigalos that line the beach. While they stand quietly behind a guarded rope, once someone chooses to cross that boundary (say, to swim in the ocean rather than the pool) handsome young men swoop down with a carpet bomb technique to sell trinkets.

It's the first in a series of escalating sequences of exploitation, ones that will make you scowl and wince and swap your sympathies until you wind up hating absolutely everyone on screen. In a nutshell, Teresa is quick to go with the flow and treat the Kenyan natives as objects rather than people. It starts with commenting on their skin and physique and ends with her ordering unwilling servants to perform very NC-17 sex acts at her bidding.

Along the way, though, there are numerous touching scenes where Teresa and the other older, cellulite-ridden women speak with frankness and honesty about their dissatisfaction with their bodies and how they feel they are perceived by a world conditioned by standard models of beauty. If these scenes were ripped from the rest of the film they'd be classic Dr. Phil moments, so much so that you'd root for these women to, I dunno, make a nude calendar of themselves or something.

Their direct action, however, is to engage the local, impoverished citizenry in acts of prostitution. In Teresa's case, however, it isn't that straightforward. She's delusional enough to think her first encounter is a real relationship, even after her lover starts bluntly hitting her up for money for her sister's kid, for the local school and for his sick father. Even after she discovers the sister is actually his wife she continues to believe that she may find something resembling "love" on the beach.

Seidl's presentation of the Africans is fascinating. In addition to all being trilingual, they all seem to know that merely being a body isn't going to be enough. They have to sell charm, they have to sell passion, they have to sell that they are falling in love. Their drive to squeeze every encounter for maximum profit is equally determined. We hardly see a crack in this armor and that makes it even more heartbreaking.

Seidl's scenes (shot, at least in part, by legendary DP Ed Lachman) are relentless. There are many long takes that just refuse to turn away. The resort comes off squalid, but shot differently it would be catalogue-ready. There is a lot of uncomfortable nudity, climaxing in an orgy in which four drunken, verbally abusive women challenge one another to see who can give their dancing rent boy an erection.

Is this female empowerment? If the sexes were reversed everyone involved in the making of this film would likely get arrested. If the film visited an impoverished area with white people would the imagery be this disturbing? The depth of race and gender signifiers are legion, and the frequent refrain of "Hakuna Matada" adds a creepy element of infantilization for good measure.

I spent the bulk of "Paradise Love" mimicking Edvard Munch's "The Scream." It's been a long time since I've seen such a disturbing film. Beyond the alarming imagery, the uncomfortable nature of the circular exploitation is maddening. If these people were just honest with one another from the start so much pain could have been avoided.

The ultimate question, which brings us back to the opening images, is trying to figure out Seidel's point of view. He may just be a sadistic bastard who likes to rub our face in misery. I'd like to believe that's not the case, and that he has a greater purpose in examining such a morally bankrupt scenario. Perhaps a second viewing of the film would tease this out, but, regardless of how much I admire this extraordinary film, that's a trip I'm in no hurry to take.

SCORE: 9.0 / 10

Note: "Paradise: Love" is part of a larger trilogy including "Paradise: Faith" and "Paradise: Hope," focusing on Teresa's sister and daughter during their own vacations. The other films in the series will be released later in the year.

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Styles: Euro feel-bad realism Others: Paradise: Hope, Paradise: Faith, Lucas Belvaux’ The Trilogy

The first of a triptych of films from Austrian director Ulrich Seidl about three women from the same family who each undergo an emotionally trying, largely physical journey towards recognizing some dispiriting aspect of themselves, Paradise: Love is about a fifty-year-old, overweight, middle class Austrian woman on a fairly unpleasant vacation to Kenya. That’s not intended to be mean: those descriptors are front-and-center among the movie’s ideas. The fact that the woman is overweight and fifty is essential to the story, and Seidl uses a good chunk of his narrative time proving his willingness to show every wrinkle and fold of flab on his protagonist’s body.

Her name is Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), and, because of a number of dutiful habits she’s shown engaging in, like keeping her teenage daughter on time for appointments and cleaning her hotel bathroom, she seems like a perfectly pleasant person (though Seidl doesn’t seem too interested in coming forward with information or insight that might give us a deeper understanding of who she is). Quickly growing bored lounging around the bar and pool of the Kenyan resort she’s checked into, Teresa wanders off the reservation into the aggressive world of young Kenyan men who make their living hocking wares to European tourists. She finds that she can’t take a walk down a beach without roughly a dozen of them thrusting jewelry in her face, and when she finally acquiesces to buy a few necklaces for her daughter, she finds that cheap trinkets are just the tip of the iceberg of what the young men are selling.

The majority of the movie’s time is taken up with following Teresa from the tiny apartment of one Kenyan man to the tiny apartment of the next, as she allows them to sell her first jewelry, then sex (rendered impassively and raw by Seidl). Finally,they sell her any one of a stock supply of bleeding heart stories, invariably involving some tragically ill family member, intended to squeeze out of her every bill of cash she’s got.

Paradise: Love is about the sad clash of basic human needs. On the one hand, the film shows audiences a lonely, aging, and well-intentioned European lady who’s done nothing worse than indulge a desire to see the beauties of Africa from a safe vantage point (though if you consider one of the beauties of Africa to be the bodies of its young men, then her vantage point becomes progressively more dangerous as the film goes on.) On the other, we see a mass of poor Kenyans who don’t have any recourse for making a living beyond duping women like Teresa who, after all, have come to Kenya of their own free will to spend money and have a good time. The way the men use Teresa in order to con her out of money doesn’t come off as malicious, or even particularly damaging. In Seidl’s view, it’s simply a way to make a living in a country without a whole lot of other prospects for upward mobility.

The director’s not interested in condemning Teresa for being a daft European tourist, either; he views her sad vacation days with a realistic, tender eye, and has no less sympathy for the way she objectifies African men for their dicks and muscular bodies than for the way they see her as little more than a way to make money for their families. The whole thing is a downer, naturally, constructed that way to its core, though very professionally shot and acted. Its brightest part, intentional though hardly overwhelming, is the way Seidl consistently and rawly captures modern Africa in an undeniably believable way. Although, for a film that shows how mundane and miserable the supposedly exotic life there can be, that’s not a terribly cheering ray of light.

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Paradise: Love Movie Review: Ulrich Seidl’s Grim Arcadia

The first film in Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy is the fascinating and troubling Paradise: Love . Initially, Seidl had intended on shooting Paradise as one complete picture. But after four years and over 80 hours of rushes, the only decision that made sense was to split it into three features about three women from one family.

Paradise: Love deals with sex tourism in Kenya. The trilogy also includes Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope , respectively dealing with a Catholic missionary and a diet camp. For this picture, Seidl’s “paradise” is barren; his view is of a culture of necessary exploitation.

Margarethe Tiesel is Teresa, a 50-year-old woman in need of an escape. She leaves her daughter with her sister and heads off to Kenya for a vacation. She is eventually swept up in the idea of being a “Sugar Mama,” a sex tourist with a thirst for the “Beach Boys” lingering outside the roped-off range of her resort.

Thanks to the encouragement of a friend (Inge Maux), Teresa moves from one African man to the next. Munga (Peter Kuzungu) seems to be authentically in love with her, but the real story is more “complicated.” Teresa longs for someone to look her in the eyes, but the search is nearly impossible in a land where money is all that matters.

Paradise: Love is powerful because it focuses on a group of well-heeled women who are in love with the idea of being loved. They’ve come to a place where they believe they have control. They yearn to feel special and to feel young again, but the harsh realities of the Sugar Mama society sink in and the inevitable crush of disappointment takes its toll.

The Africa of Paradise: Love rings with the catchphrase “hakuna matata,” but this is no sanitized Lion King dance. This is a continent long victimized and it has become a den of exploitation in its own right. The Beach Boys have learned how to operate and how to turn tourists yearning for “the wild side” into opportunities.

This is a picture about being used. There’s an acknowledgement and an eventual acceptance of this fact, but that doesn’t stop Teresa from feeling the same dissatisfaction in Kenya that drove her to the locale in the first place. From the perspective of the “Beach Boys,” the acceptance of being used is part of the lifestyle. There is no shame; even wives are in on the operation.

Seidl’s steadfast working method is all over Paradise: Love . The filmmaker works from what could be described as a documentary setting and most of the picture is very organic. This is largely because of the lack of traditional script and any structured dialogue. And by using actors and non-actors alike, Seidl preserves authenticity.

Of course, it helps to have such skilled performers as Tiesel inhabiting key roles. Her Teresa is a figure of loneliness. Her struggle for contentment is neatly juxtaposed against her desire to feel loved. An early scene involving her life with developmentally-disabled adults suggests a tone of responsibility, as does an early scene with her daughter. Her desire to escape is apparent.

Paradise: Love is a hopeless motion picture. It reveals a Kenya where money is the only thing that matters. There are few redeemable characters among the “Beach Boys,” even if their actions are understandable, but the white women are far from innocent victims. This is equal opportunity exploitation: everyone gets what they’re after and nobody is truly fulfilled.

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Paradise: Love (2012)

Directed by ulrich seidl.

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Description by Wikipedia

Paradise: Love (German: Paradies: Liebe) is a 2012 drama film directed by Ulrich Seidl. It tells the story of a 50-year-old white woman who travels to Kenya as a sex tourist. The project is an Austrian production with co-producers in Germany and France. It is the first installment in Seidl's Paradise trilogy, a project first conceived as one film with three parallel stories.

Paradise: Love competed at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It subsequently screened within such festivals as Toronto International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival and New Zealand International Film Festival.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, paradise: hope.

Now streaming on:

You can tell an Ulrich Seidl film by its rigorous form and seemingly digressive improvisations. It's like a corral with mathematically precise iron gates that herd a human menagerie into striking configurations. The previous two sentences are the high-toned kinds of things critics have been writing about Seidl's work since his early breakthroughs "Models" (1999) and " Dog Days " (2001), so I figured I'd get it out of the way.

"Paradise: Hope" is the final film in Seidl's " Paradise " trilogy, after the blindingly beautiful, wise "Love" and the quiet storm of "Faith." The subject of "Hope" is Melanie ( Melanie Lenz ), the 13-year-old daughter of the first film's protagonist and niece of the second film's subject. All three episodes are about an Austrian woman (in this case a budding woman), seeking fulfillment in a partner. Melanie's mother sought affection and appreciation from Kenyan boy toys. Her aunt sought it in the arms of Jesus. And now Melanie seeks an outlet for her surging sexual curiosity, finding a candidate even less appropriate than impoverished Africans or a Christ statue: The director of her weight loss camp, a doctor at least 40 years her senior.

Which reminds me to mention another high-toned thing you'll hear from critics about Seidl: He's a provocateur who traffics in shocking, embarrassing and emotionally taxing situations. His characters pursue happiness right into traps set by cruel, duplicitous exploiters, or, worse, by such disadvantages as aging, obesity, disability and poverty. These films are described as grueling endurance tests, "not for the squeamish."

We live with a culture that can stare unblinkingly at grisly murders, Ultimate Fighter concussions, all manner of petty, bloody cruelties, so long as they are packaged as entertainment or certified as high art. What seems to inspire all the hand-wringing advisories about Seidl's relatively non-violent films is the way their protagonists refuse our pity while his camera refuses to look away from everyday realities we've been conditioned to find pathetic or distasteful. In "Love," Melanie's full-figured, middle-aged mother, Teresa, strode onto a Kenyan beach in a bathing suit, inviting cringes from viewers who couldn't imagine anyone seeing her as beautiful or desirable. In "Faith", Melanie's aunt Anna Maria seemed a spinsterish Jesus freak, clinging to her faith in lieu of getting a life.

What those reponses miss is how often Seidl shows Teresa to be radiantly beautiful, in her blushing anticipation and curiosity at first; her woozy afterglow when she's finally scored what she believes is a foreigner who sees into her heart. Similarly, we learn that Anna Maria is no holy fool, but a woman with a past as full of physical pleasures and emotional disappointments, a past so turbulent that it drove her further into her faith as a refuge. And both women prove as capable of cruelty and ignorance as they are of tenderness and insight. Seidl's camera always stands back to let the women's environments and their orientation within them tell their stories in a way that can inspire compassionate recognition. (The cruelty and condescension many critics impute to Seidl seems more like projection.)

"Hope" lavishes the same rigorous attention on a chubby girl at fat camp. Melanie's accelerated coming of age happens against a backdrop of strictly regimented camp life, a series of exercises, chores, excursions and physical exams that Seidl frames the way one might photograph a factory assembly line. Seidl's masterpiece, "Import Export," found gentle comedy in the way his young heroine walked to her dreary job over dingy snow, past ugly Ukraine smokestacks, dressed like a glam snow bunny. Seidl is fascinated with the little ways people decorate their lives to reflect the brighter future they are toiling for within a rigid system that both promises that future and continually denies it. In "Hope," Melanie and her fat-kid friends perform drills best suited to stoic Marines, arrayed in Seidl compositions as orderly as the kids are endearingly sloppy and listless. The white-and-beige walls of this place seem as uninspired as the staff. Yet these middle schoolers find ways to sneak in booze and music for classic spin-the-bottle parties. They are secretly, defiantly alive in a dead place.

When Melanie falls under the spell of a silver-haired pedophile as tall and trim as a Marine ( Joseph Lorenz ), the film gets set on its rocky path to a conclusion that fulfills the film's title and rounds out the "Paradise" series quite beautifully—if you're not afraid to look.

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Film credits.

Paradise: Hope (2013)

100 minutes

Melanie Lenz as Melanie

Verena Lehbauer as Verena

Joseph Lorenz as Doktor

Viviane Bartsch as Ernährungsberaterin

Michael Thomas as Sporttrainer

Johanna Schmid as Hanni

Ulrich Seidl
Veronika Franz

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Paradise love.

US Release Date: 04-26-2013

Directed by: Ulrich Seidl

Starring ▸ ▾

Margarethe Tiesel , as
Peter Kazungu , as
Inge Maux , as
Teresa's friend
Dunja Sowinetz , as
Helen Brugat , as
Gabriel Mwarua , as
Josphat Hamisi , as
Carlos Mkutano as

Margarethe Tiesel checks out the locals in Paradise: Love .

Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) is the first part of a trilogy of films by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. The other installments, which he already shot and originally planned to edit together as one long film, are called Faith and Hope . Each one features a female member of the same Austrian family undergoing a life changing experience. Love tells about the 50 year old Teresa who travels to Kenya as a sex tourist. (International Sex Tourism is a growing industry and not just for men.)

Ulrich used locals as the for-rent beachboys. They are well-built young men that hang around the beaches in front of resorts and befriend any vacationing European women (usually aging and wealthy) whose eye they can catch. Teresa sleeps with several of them but she is searching for love. She yearns for a man to gaze longingly into her eyes and make passionate love to her.

Realistically this just ain't gonna happen. Not with these men anyway. They are all at least 20 years younger than she is and Teresa is quite obese (see photo). She kids herself into believing one local man named Munga actually has feelings for her. But, like every other man she meets and sleeps with, he eventually gets around to asking for money; never for himself but always for a family member in dire need. In the most dramatic moment Teresa makes a scene in public after realizing that Munga is a prostitute and that the woman he introduced as his sister is really his wife holding their baby. Love comes with a price tag even on the sands of paradise.

Love, sex and race all get tossed into this celluloid salad. Teresa, and her fellow sex tourists (all of whom are Caucasian Europeans), sexually objectify these young African men (in the same manner men have traditionally objectified female prostitutes). But race also plays a factor. They say insulting things about these men (in German) right in front of their faces and one woman states that she just loves how Negro skin smells like cocoanut and that she can't get enough of licking and biting it.

At first Teresa seems different from these predatory females. She is searching for more than just hot no-strings-attached sex. She dreams of finding her soul mate. But by the end of the film she has become a much more morally ambiguous figure.

The most unique thing about Paradise: Love is the amount of nudity on display. Margarethe Tiesel is fearless. She spends half the film with her giant saggy tits out and even does a full frontal that isn't pretty. The men are not left out. In fact this is the most dick I have ever seen in a non-porn film. In one extended scene Teresa and 3 fellow sex tourists hire a young man to strip for all of them in her hotel room to celebrate Teresa's 50th birthday. One woman ties a pink string around the man's cock and they stroke it, and he rubs his semi-erect penis against Teresa's breasts. This isn't your typical Hollywood movie.

Paradise: Love takes a thought-provoking look at one woman's search for happiness in the little known world of sex tourism. By the time Teresa takes that final solitary walk on the beach, the movie leaves you with a feeling that it was all very sordid and kinda sad. Romantics be forewarned, this is not a happy take on either paradise or love. But as a character study it's riveting to watch Tiesel bring Teresa to vivid and fully-realized life.

How is it not obvious that they are only after her money?

Teresa does not travel to Kenya with the explicit goal of being a sex tourist. If she did she would not have been so naïve to how it works. Early on she is a bit shocked by a fellow vacationer speaking so casually about it. She soon decides to spend time with local men but seems to not understand the arrangement.

The men all tell her that they love her and she seems so hopelessly desperate that she believes them. Short of a sheltered virgin, I cannot imagine a woman dumb enough to not get it. These young, poor men run up to her, call her mama and tell her that they love her. After they have sex they ask for money with some made up excuse. Packs of these men literally stand just outside the border of the resort waiting for a tourist to cross the line. These men sell trinkets or themselves very aggressively.

The fact that she becomes offended by a whore lying to her shows us how stupid she is. I would understand if she was a young socialite, but at 50 years of age, you would think she could see these men for what they are. I felt no pity for her, what-so-ever, when she finally realized they were only interested in her money.

As Patrick wrote, these old fat European women treat these men without the slightest amount of dignity. The scene Patrick mentioned where they hire a young man to strip for all of them in her hotel room is in fact pornographic. There is direct contact with his penis by their hands and breast. They end up disappointed when he does not get an erection and make fun of him because of it.

It takes lots of money and several lovers for Teresa to learn the age old lesson that you can buy someone’s body but not their love.

Photos © Copyright Strand Releasing (2013)

Related Review

Paradise: Love

Cast & crew.

Margarete Tiesel

Peter Kazungu

Teresas Freundin

Dunja Sowinetz

Urlaubsfreundinnen

Helen Brugat

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Paradise’ on Netflix, a Dystopian Sci-fi Thriller from Germany

Where to stream:, paradise (2023).

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German sci-fi thriller Paradise (now on Netflix) asks the tantalizing question: What if time was money? And not in the old-adage, metaphorical sense, but literally? Director Boris Kunz’s film establishes a not-too-far-off future society where people can sell or donate actual years from their lives, years that others can use to prolong their own lives. As always is the case with high-concept fodder, the question is whether the premise holds up under scrutiny – or at least paints over an absurd concept with some compelling drama and/or action.

PARADISE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Max (Kostja Ullmann) as he gives a young man, maybe in his late teens, a hard sell: Give up 15 years of his life in exchange for €700,000. Think of everything you could do with that money, Max says. Your family would no longer be poor and living in a hovel, your father could start a business, and all that. The kid agrees, and Max makes his way from the area on the wrong side of the tracks – it looks like the urban hell of Children of Men or Beau is Afraid – past armed guards and fences and to the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, where the streets are clean and non-chaotic. Another day, another deal for Max’s employer, Aeon, for whom he’s brokered 276 years, earning him a salesman of the year award from CEO Sophie Thiessen (Iris Berben). Then he goes home to his fancy-ass apartment for dinner and oral sexytimes with his wife Elena (Marlene Tanczik), who’s a doctor, a profession that, in this timeline, is a lot like teachers in our own in that they’re essential cornerstones of society who earn a shekel or two more than diddly-squat. Meanwhile, leaders of a counter-Aeon movement target Thiessen, committing murderous acts of terrorism against de-aged people. Consider the dystopia established!

Max and Elena visit her parents for dinner. Her father isn’t so sure about Max’s moral values, and debates him. It’s obvious that what Max and Aeon do is awful, ripe for corruption and only deepens the divide between the haves and the have-nots. We’re all thinking it: What kind of creep does this? But Max delivers a quality-over-quantity argument and then he and Elena go home to find their apartment in flames. The insurance company says someone left a candle burning so they’re not paying up and our protags are on the hook for €2.5 million right now . And you thought insurance companies couldn’t get any worse! Of course, they don’t have that kind of money, and this is where we learn that banks could actually get worse, too: In order to acquire the apartment, Elena put down 40 years of her life as collateral. And now it’s time to collect.

For Max, this is a lesson in, you know, whaddayacallit, irony. Big, fat, flaming-hot-cheeto irony. This is when we see the procedure: Elena is strapped in a chair and three needles are inserted into her side. That’s it. Anticlimactic, ain’t it? Then she goes home and over the course of some unspecified amount of time that’s significantly less than 40 years, she ages 40 years, and is now thankfully not played by Tanczik in old-lady makeup or with a CGI’d face, but Corinna Kirchhoff. At this point, we learn a few things that really get the plot rolling: The procedure can be reversed. The donor and the recipient need to have a DNA match in order for it to work. There are black-market firms in Lithuania that’ll perform the procedure. And Sophie Thiessen over there – is it me, or does she look younger now? Like, 40 years or so, if I had to guess. THE PLOT THICKS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Paradise covers similar conceptual territory as In Time , and it also has the look and feel of Gattaca ’s future dystopia. (Notably, both of those movies are directed by Andrew Niccol.)

Performance Worth Watching: Tanczik and Kirchhoff provide a sturdy emotional foundation to a film that barely has room for such a thing.

Memorable Dialogue: Elena’s jokey mantra she repeats, re: any moral compromise she made marrying Max: “I love him despite his being a small cog in the capitalist machine.”

Sex and Skin: Max has no problem whatsoever going down on Young Elena or Old Elena. That’s love!

Our Take: Paradise – nonsense title, by the way – has the trappings of a movie ripe for an English-language remake populated by a couple of A-listers. And for once, it’d be worthwhile, since there’s plenty of room for improvement here. Plenty. Conceptually, it’s absurd in a pragmatic sense (the movie’s all the better for not even attempting to explain the science behind it) but philosophically compelling: What makes for a more valuable life, the length or the girth? I don’t have a good answer for that, which is grist for the mill of contemplation.

But instead of exploring this idea in a thoughtful manner, Paradise is a raging mediocrity that devolves into formulaic drivel: kidnapping, shootouts, dopey twists, that old scene where our on-the-run protagonists find a random car that inevitably has the keys in it because if it didn’t the plot would come to a screeching halt, etc. There’s even a scene where a character nearly dies after sinking into quicksand. Quicksand! Shut up with the quicksand! When’s the last time we saw that demon quicksand in a movie? The ’50s? The movie accidentally comments on itself when a character utters amidst all the hoopla, “There has to be another way than this free-for-all.”

Visually, the film is competent but mundane, its moody colors and lighting and boilerplate action sequences lifted from dozens of dystopian brouhahas before it. Although Kunz and a small pile of screenwriters work in a modicum of world-building, they mostly shun the implications of this society for action-thriller cliches. There’s little attempt to dig deeper into Max, who’s been sliding down a slippery ethical slope and now finds himself trying to climb back up, and Elena is rarely more than a plot device. And the third act is monumentally dumb, just one eyeroll after another after another. Paradise is a classic case of decent concept/lousy execution.

Our Call: How much is two hours of your life worth? SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Home » Movies » Movie Reviews

Paradise (2023) Review – a solid and engaging dystopian thriller

At its core, this is a story of a desperate couple trying to get back what was stolen from them.

Here is our review of the 2023 Netflix film Paradise, which does not contain significant spoilers.

The dystopian sci-fi Paradise is a Netflix original production from Germany that was directed and co-written by Boris Kunz . Featuring a story about a world where time is currency, the movie stars Marlene Tanczik , Kostja Ullmann , Iris Berben , and Lisa-Marie Koroll.

Paradise (2023) Review and Plot Summary

Paradise is set in a not-too-distant future when a company called AEON has figured out a way to reverse the aging process. However, there’s quite a big catch; Someone needs to sacrifice years of their life and donate it to the receiver. And donors and receivers need to have matching DNA.

Our protagonist, Max Toma is a highly successful sales broker whose job is to sweet-talk poor young people into accepting cold hard cash for years of their lives. We first meet Max convincing an 18-year-old immigrant to “donate” 15 of his years for a fixed sum of €700,000.

That’s just about enough cash to get his parents out of poverty and hire an immigration lawyer to help secure his father’s visa.

While the controversial system is rife with corruption and potential for abuse, as far as Max is concerned, life’s good. Not only did Max get an employee of the year recognition and a pat on the back from the CEO of AEON, Sophie Theissen, but he and his wife, Elena, just bought a luxury apartment and are trying for a baby.

It all comes crashing down when the couple’s apartment burns down. Their insurance won’t pay a penny and the bank will forcefully collect on the collateral; 40 years of Elena’s life.

If the plot for Paradise sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because it’s similar to 2011’s In Time starring Justin Timberlake. While In Time was a mediocre flashy action where everyone stopped aging at 25, this one executes the concept better.

There are several twists and turns through the runtime, but at its core, this is a story of a desperate couple trying to get back what was stolen from them. Some scenes of human cruelty are hard to watch, but that’s probably the point.

Aside from the in-your-face inequality message, this movie offers a compelling character study while asking pertinent questions about love and the worth of youth.

When we met Max, he described himself as a “cog” in the machine. The system worked well for him until it didn’t. Then he turns away from AEON and has to face the real question; how far are you willing to go to save the person you love?

As a downside, the film has too many side plots and doesn’t fully develop them. The main storyline is solid, but the will-they-won’t-they with Sophie’s security team members feels convoluted. As do most of the scenes with the Adam resistance group.

Kunz tried adding too many layers to an already complicated plot and not all of it works.

Is the 2023 movie Paradise good or bad?

While far from perfect, Paradise is an engaging thriller that kept me glued to the screen for nearly two hours.

Is the 2023 movie Paradise worth watching?

As far as Netflix originals go, Paradise is quite a gem. It’s got a great cast, a compelling story, and neat-looking CGI effects.

What did you think of the 2023 Netflix film Paradise? Comment below.

Article by Lori Meek

Lori Meek has been a Ready Steady Cut contributing writer since September 2022 and has had over 400 published articles since. She studied Film and Television at Southampton Solent University, where she gained most of her knowledge and passion for the entertainment industry. Lori’s work is also featured on platforms such as TBreak Media and ShowFaves.

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20 Best Reality TV Shows Right Now

90 day fiancé: is liz woods' ego out of control (signs it might be), 90 day fiancé star omar albakour makes major announcement after trying to become u.s. citizen.

Kyle's sperm donation hobby is a huge red flag in his relationship with Ani and indicates potential manipulation.
Kyle's obsessive focus on sperm health, supplements, and avoiding coffee raises concerns about his overall health obsession.
Kyle's unconventional sperm donation methods, including having intercourse with clients, blur ethical boundaries and show a detachment from intimacy.

Kyle Gordy is the most controversial star on 90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise , and he might be the most problematic cast member to ever appear in the franchise. The 32-year-old accountant and Anika “Ani” Philipp have navigated a challenging relationship due to Kyle's extreme hobby of donating sperm . Initially inspired by helping a lesbian couple conceive, Kyle now sees his donations as a charitable act and has fathered 71 children, with more on the way. Kyle might be using Ani for clout , and it's working.

This hobby, which has become almost an obsession, affects his ability to sustain romantic relationships, as seen on 90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise season 4 with Ani. Kyle and Ani, a 39-year-old German living in Malta, met because Ani wanted another child via a sperm donor. However, their relationship quickly became romantic. Ani is undoubtedly into Kyle, but his sperm donation is creating significant tension between them. Here's why he's a walking red flag and perhaps the worst cast member to ever star in the 90 Day Fiancé franchise.

Reality TV is more popular than ever. With so many to choose from, here are some of the best reality TV shows to stream or watch right now.

Kyle Donates Sperm As A Hobby

He's masking the bizarre hobby as a business.

Kyle is " a sperm donor who help[s] singles and couples have children without going through a sperm bank ."

Kyle donates sperm as a hobby, which is a huge red flag, and seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to have sex with as many women as he wants. Ani is clearly uncomfortable with his side hustle, but Kyle insists that it comes from a good place and is part of who he is. According to Kyle's website, Be Pregnant Now , Kyle is " a sperm donor who help[s] singles and couples have children without going through a sperm bank ." The Los Angeles resident gained the attention of Dr. Phil for his unconventional fertility methods, having fathered over seventy children since he began his endeavors.

Kyle's sperm donation hobby is a huge red flag, and Ani would be smart to get out of the relationship now.

Kyle's health obsession, driven by his fixation on sperm donation, also raises red flags. He takes around 20 supplements daily to boost his sperm count and avoids coffee due to its negative effects on sperm. In a recent episode, Ani noticed his frequent adjustments of his genitalia, which Kyle explained as necessary to prevent overheating of his sperm. His decision to wear only shorts for this reason, describing it as " professional, " further highlights his extreme focus on sperm health. Everything he does should give Ani "the ick," but she has yet to leave the relationship.

Kyle's Sperm Donating Business Operates At A Loss

Kyle loses money on his hobby.

90 Day Fiance Love In Paradise Kyle Gordy and Ani Phillip eating dinner in Malta

Having a side hustle has become popular in recent years, but Kyle's business isn't even making him any money , as he allegedly doesn't charge his customers for his services. Kyle claims his sperm count is extraordinarily high and has fathered 71 children, with nine more on the way, spread across the globe. He has offspring on the west and east coasts and abroad, including the United Kingdom and France.

His sperm donation journey began at 22 when he offered to help a lesbian couple he knew, who found sperm bank options too expensive. This led to his hobby growing through word of mouth and social media, resulting in Kyle donating three to five times a month . However, calling sperm donation a hobby is a huge red flag for future relationships. Donating sperm is an expression of Kyle's obsession with sex. It is neither safe nor ethical, and Ani needs to run as far as she can.

Kyle Has Intercourse With His Customers

The ethics of his hobby are blurred.

90 Day Fiance Love In Paradise Ani during interview and Kyle with hands clasped together in scene

Most of his clients use a sample of his sperm for home insemination with a syringe, although Kyle does have intercourse with a whopping one-third of his recipients . While sperm donation itself is not particularly controversial, Kyle rightfully raised eyebrows with his unconventional methods. Kyle donates his sperm through sexual intercourse, claiming it has a higher success rate and is less costly than artificial insemination. His casual approach to the act, treating it as purely transactional, indicates how his perception of intimacy has been altered by his frequent donations.

Having sex with sperm donation recipients is neither ethical nor a typical business practice.

Kyle even detailed the process on 90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise season 4 , showing a surprising detachment from the sexual nature of the interactions. Ani confronted Kyle about his sperm donations during their relationship , particularly a recent trip to Australia. Kyle initially evaded her questions but eventually admitted to having sex to help a woman who couldn't afford in vitro fertilization. He attempted to downplay the act by calling it a "procedure," which Ani rejected, emphasizing that Kyle could not continue donating if they were to have a future together.

While it's entertaining to watch a trainwreck in real time, Kyle's hobby of sperm donation is incredibly problematic and manipulative. Despite any feelings Ani might have toward Kyle, he's perhaps the most poisonous cast member the 90 Day Fiancé franchise has ever seen. Kyle's approach is manipulative and gross, and Ani needs to get out of this relationship. Hopefully, Ani will see through his shocking actions and leave him on 90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise before she gets pregnant with his child.

90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on TLC.

Source: Be Pregnant Now

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COMMENTS

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"Paradise: Love" is a hard film to like and an even harder film to unpack, it's so loaded with layers of -isms. And perhaps it doesn't have a huge amount to contribute to the discourse ...
Paradise: Love (2012)
Paradise: Love: Directed by Ulrich Seidl. With Margarete Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux, Dunja Sowinetz. Teresa, a fifty-year-old Austrian mother, travels to the paradise of the beaches of Kenya, seeking out love from African boys. But she must confront the hard truth that on the beaches of Kenya, love is a business.
Paradise: Love
Running time: 120 MIN. With: With: Margarethe Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux, Dunja Sowinetz, Helen Brugat, Gabriel Nguma Mwarua, Josphat Hamisi, Carlos Mkutano, Maria Hofstaetter, Melanie Lenz ...
Film review: Paradise: Love
A middle-aged woman seeks companionship in sunny climes, but Shirley Valentine this isn't.. The first part of a trilogy by Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl, Love is an unsparing inquiry into sex ...
‎Paradise: Love (2012) directed by Ulrich Seidl • Reviews, film + cast
103 likes. Review by Jack ★★★★ 2. Ulrich Seidl's first entry in the Paradise trilogy is a deeply ponderous, unpleasant yet utterly sublime portrait of one's desperation for love and the illusions of paradisiacal bliss. Set in the beaches of Kenya, Seidl plants a dejected woman searching for meaningful human connection in a place ...
Paradise: Love
Paradise: Love. Ulrich Seidl. 120 minutes. Not Rated. Margarete Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux (In German, English, and Swahili w/ subtitles) Austrian director Ulrich Seidl ( Import/Export, Dog ...
Paradise: Love: Cannes Review
Movies; Movie Reviews; Paradise: Love: Cannes Review. Director Ulrich Seidl's first part in his trilogy about three women from the same family is a provocative feature on female sex tourism.
Paradise: Love 2013, directed by Ulrich Seidl
'Paradise: Love,' the startling first part of a planned trilogy of female character studies from unhurried Austrian auteur . Ulrich Seidl, takes a rather less rosy view of the benefits of sun ...
Paradise: Love review
To be followed by Paradise: Faith (July) and Paradise: Hope (Aug), Love is the first in Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl's
Review: 'Paradise: Love'
Review: 'Paradise: Love'. The striking opening images of Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise: Love" would, in a normal movie, be disturbing enough to resonate through the entire picture. Honestly, by the ...
Paradise: Love
Paradise: Love. Paradise: Love ( German: Paradies: Liebe) is a 2012 drama film directed by Ulrich Seidl. It tells the story of a 50-year-old Austrian woman who travels to Kenya as a sex tourist. [1] The project is an Austrian production with co-producers in Germany and France. It is the first installment in Seidl's Paradise trilogy, a project ...
Paradise: Love
The first of a triptych of films from Austrian director Ulrich Seidl about three women from the same family who each undergo an emotionally trying, largely physical journey towards recognizing some dispiriting aspect of themselves, Paradise: Love is about a fifty-year-old, overweight, middle class Austrian woman on a fairly unpleasant vacation to Kenya. That's not intended to be mean: those ...
Paradise: Love Movie Review: Ulrich Seidl's Grim Arcadia
The first film in Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy is the fascinating and troubling Paradise: Love.Initially, Seidl had intended on shooting Paradise as one complete picture. But after four years and over 80 hours of rushes, the only decision that made sense was to split it into three features about three women from one family.
Paradise: Love (2012)
Description by Wikipedia. Paradise: Love (German: Paradies: Liebe) is a 2012 drama film directed by Ulrich Seidl. It tells the story of a 50-year-old white woman who travels to Kenya as a sex tourist. The project is an Austrian production with co-producers in Germany and France.
Paradise: Hope movie review & film summary (2013)
In "Hope," Melanie and her fat-kid friends perform drills best suited to stoic Marines, arrayed in Seidl compositions as orderly as the kids are endearingly sloppy and listless. The white-and-beige walls of this place seem as uninspired as the staff. Yet these middle schoolers find ways to sneak in booze and music for classic spin-the-bottle ...
Paradise: Love
There are no user reviews yet. ... The Telegraph Apr 23, 2013 Paradise: Love flits nimbly between humour and sadness, and treats potentially ponderous themes such as sex, race and the rancid legacy of colonialism with a welcome light touch. ... We rank every movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola throughout his six-decade career including his ...
Paradise Love
Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) is the first part of a trilogy of films by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. The other installments, which he already shot and originally planned to edit together as one long film, are called Faith and Hope.Each one features a female member of the same Austrian family undergoing a life changing experience.
Paradise: Love
Available on MUBI, Prime Video, Tubi TV. On the beaches of Kenya they're known as "Sugar Mamas" -- European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise. She goes from one Beach Boy to the next, from one disappointment ...
'Paradise' Netflix Movie Review: Stream It Or Skip It?
Our Take: Paradise - nonsense title, by the way - has the trappings of a movie ripe for an English-language remake populated by a couple of A-listers. And for once, it'd be worthwhile, since ...
Paradise (2023) Review
The dystopian sci-fi Paradise is a Netflix original production from Germany that was directed and co-written by Boris Kunz.Featuring a story about a world where time is currency, the movie stars Marlene Tanczik, Kostja Ullmann, Iris Berben, and Lisa-Marie Koroll.. Paradise (2023) Review and Plot Summary. Paradise is set in a not-too-distant future when a company called AEON has figured out a ...
90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise
Kyle Gordy is the most controversial star on 90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise, and he might be the most problematic cast member to ever appear in the franchise.The 32-year-old accountant and Anika "Ani" Philipp have navigated a challenging relationship due to Kyle's extreme hobby of donating sperm.Initially inspired by helping a lesbian couple conceive, Kyle now sees his donations as a ...
What to Watch
Best TV Episodes of 2023. "Bob's Burgers," "Frontline," "Killing It" and "A Spy Among Friends" were among the series that gave us some of the best episodes of television this ...

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