Paradise: Love

You know where you stand with a Ulrich Seidl film; usually on the edge of a precipice and you know whichever way you fall the outcome is unlikely to be pleasant. Seidl is a director out to shock us; you may hate his films and see them as exploitative but you are unlikely to ever forget them. "Paradise Love" was the first in a trilogy very roughly based around the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity but if you're unfamiliar with his work, be warned; piety and what we perceive as the attributes usually associated with religion are conspicuously absent.

This first film in the trilogy is set in Kenya and deals with sex tourism, in this case women who go there with the sole purpose of having sex with the boys who hang around the beach and outside the hotels. Sex is their profession and it seems everyone is on the make. The tourists exploit the locals who exploit them in return. Seidl films all of this in the most matter-of-fact way; we could be watching a documentary.

What plot there is revolves around Teresa, (a superb and utterly fearless Margarete Tiesel), an Austrian woman who comes looking for sex but wanting love and who falls under the spell of Munga, (Peter Kazungu, one of many non-professionals in the cast). At first he's the boy who doesn't harass her on the beach or seems interested in her money but he has his own agenda and while other directors might milk this material for purely 'dramatic' effect, Seidl approaches it more as an anthropologist might, studying both sides at once and treating no-one with much respect. This is a film about racism and it leaves a very sour aftertaste. In its clinically chilly fashion it's a horror movie that will alienate many.