On the beaches of Kenya they're known as "Sugar Mamas" -- European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Read more …
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 to the next and finally she must recognize: On the beaches of Kenya love is a business.
Does this film tell us anything we didn't already know about prostitution and globalisation? Arguably, yes: maybe the role-reversal aspect defamiliarises it, makes you see it afresh, and Seidl has formidable technique and compositional sense.
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 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.
Very similar to the Charlotte Rampling film Heading South, Paradise underlines the way in which sex tourism is just a fresh twist on the old tale of colonialist oppression.
Love is eye-opening stuff from one of Europe's most daring directors. It's perhaps too repetitive to be the best of the three, but the trilogy overall is dazzling: cinematic paradise for connoisseurs of human purgatory.
As explicit as pornography, it's a serious drama that's neither erotic nor obscene.
General release. Check local listings for show times.