📽 PARADISE:HOPE [Ulrich Seidl, 2013] - Movie review by Mandibil

The third installment of a trilogy based on the theological virtues faith, hope and love and this time we are dealing with hope. Movies that are tied so closely to a specific "scripture", a direct comparison to the contents will be in place. Referring to Wikipedia I find that "hope" refers to ".. expectation of and desire of receiving" and "... lack of hope may give place to despair or cynicism".

13 year old Melanie or Melli (Melanie Lenz) is put into a weight loss clinic by her mother (the Woman in Paradise: Love). It is a place of discipline and strict, almost military, control of the "patients". Melanie shows no interest in most of her surroundings, bordering on apathy, except for her roommate Verena (Verena Lehbauer) as she is of the same age and in the same situation weight-wise. Though there are a few boys on the team, the story is only seen through the eyes of girls.

The day is a routine of eating healthy, doing gymnastics, watching films to create loathing towards food and so on. The teachers are very strict and mainly men with a very patronising attitude. It is a virtual prison for the young men and women, but they accept their fate as if it was inevitable.

They have to see the doctor frequently to check up on their weight loss progress and Melli develops a crush on the handsome, but much older, playboy type male doctor (Joseph Lorenz). She makes sure that she gets appointments with him as often as possible and he tries to make the experience of the professional intimacy feel humorous but seems unaware of her interest, at first.

During a film show Melli tries to make a deliberate move at the Doctor by sitting next to him and then putting her head on his shoulder. But he rejects her and moves away. She feels sorry for herself and extends her frustration to Verena but she advise her to do something about her looks to make herself more attractive. She parties with the other roommates late at night, drinks alcohol and smoke cigarettes. They are all in their puberty and are dealing with their hormones, their ideas of sexuality and relationships with the other sex.

In a kind of desperation, Melli and Verena, steals some food and spirits in the kitchen one night, sneaks out of the building and heads to a nearby nightclub. She lets a young man fondle her in a corner somewhere, while his friend records them on his phone. Melli is passing out drunk and the owner of the place fetches the doctor from the clinic and he drives of with her. Some distance away he stops to take a look at her on the backseat and in a mix of annoyance and arousal, he heads into a remote forest. He lays her on the forest floor and then starts to sniff her body from top to bottom, then lays down beside her. The film ends with the doctor telling her they can never meet again. The endless grey mass of disciplined weight watching carries on.

The director is superb at creating scenes of contrast between beauty and ugliness, between order and chaos. The human beings are ugly not only just in their external appearance but also in their behavior, the way they speak or their level of self awareness. In contrast to that is the perfectly composed symmetrical or golden ratio backdrops with clean and undisturbed surfaces. The straight lines. The impeccably cleaned kitchen and so on. As the only person, the doctor is a picture of superficial beauty, but below the surface and the sports car image, he is a pervert.

In this perfect, sterile and orderly physical world, chaotic youths are controlled by masochists trying to fit them in.. but they are all deformed and mentally inhibited freaks, that are unable to function in an emotionally mature way. Melli explains how she is disgusted by the thought of sex generally but particularly oral sex. For some of the girls the "prestige" of bragging about sexual "experiences" weighs higher than finding a partner that has a mature and virtuous philosophy to life. Melli "hopes" that because she fancies the doctor, he is bound to love her back. But hope is just an expectation of receiving something that you did not earn. And she did not earn the doctors respect. He only sees her as an opportunity to get a release for his perversions, by her throwing herself at him.

There may be a small point in the way the "interaction" between the two is shown. They barely touch each other. just hugging, resting the head, sniffing. It may be a deliberate way of showing "sex" without sex, since doing it for "real" would be against certain laws. If that is the case, then the scene in the doctors office where he takes of his shirt, lays down and let her "examine" him with a stethoscope, makes more sense. Because it repeats in way in the forest when we would think he "date raped" her. I am inclined to interpret it that way.

But at the same time, all the references to father figures and potential lover figures, could indicate the problems with absent fathers - mostly drawn away by mothers wanting divorces and using the state to control and destroy, particularly their daughters, relation to their parents and their development of ideas of sexuality and male relations in general.It is no secret that girls matures faster sexually when there is not a father around. It is just an insurmountable problem with young kids, getting mentally hammered by state schooling, also loose emotional connections with fathers and only have mothers, who bash men, as a reference.

It is a movie that grows on you long after you stopped watching it. Right after viewing it i actually felt a little disappointed and unsatisfied. But it kept lurking around in my head and now i feel confident in recommending this as a great movie. There are a few too many scenes of the "inmates" marching in single file from left to right and back again. The fetish for geometrical perfection is almost over the top. But again the point is to stretch the contrast to its extremes and that is really the main feature of this movie. There is just a mesmerizing sense of space and air in the composition that draws you in. I have not yet seen the middle movie in the trilogy, but I am looking forward to it.

Rating: 8/10