With the last installment of his “Paradise” trilogy, rigid Austrian schoolmaster-cum-director Ulrich Seidl unbends, just a little. This is, by some distance, the best movie of the three, and it showcases the impeccable symmetry of his compositions, while retaining his compulsion to wag a finger in your face.
The setting is what’s unkindly called a fat camp. The protagonist is Melanie (Melanie Lenz), the 13-year-old daughter of a character from the series’ first movie, “Paradise: Love.” Melanie is, like her mom, overweight; but in this movie, it’s the adults at the facility who are doing the fat-shaming, not the camera. The kids are downright poignant when they’re lined up doing endless rounds of joyless somersaults, or singing a miserable rendition of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Fat.”
Then there’s the camp doctor (Joseph Lorenz): Melanie has a crush on him, and he is tempted to cross that very bright line. It’s a situation that’s handled with some delicacy, not a quality at all in evidence in parts 1 and 2. But it says a lot about Seidl’s dyspeptic worldview that when a complex, somewhat sympathetic adult appears in this trilogy, that adult is struggling not to become a pedophile.