Paradise: Hope movie review & film summary (2013)

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."

Nonsense.

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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