The art of Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (Import Export) often feels closer to still photography than to cinema. He’ll regularly stage an entire scene in a single, static shot, characters and objects arranged in a tableau. His manipulation of natural light is exquisite, conveying a natural beauty that transcends—or at least complicates—his taste for provocative content. (Seidl’s most consistent subjects are antisocial behavior and sexual exploitation, and he’s often been characterized as antihumanist.) He trades less in characterization than in portraiture, casting both professional and nonprofessional actors based on their physical qualities or personal backgrounds.
These conversations communicate naive desire as well as decadent lust, just as Seidl’s ingenious compositions balance the natural beauty of Kenya with the garish order of the tourists’ resort hotel. Paradise: Love neither condemns nor excuses sex tourism, arriving instead at the sort of complicated truths for which pictorial art is an ideal vehicle.
Directed by Ulrich Seidl
