A single Austrian teacher, overweight and over 50, jets off to a spectacular Kenyan resort, hoping for a fling with a beautiful young man. It could be “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” but Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise: Love” (the first part of a trilogy) is about sex tourism, and it’s no idyll.
There are striking compositions — the “beach boys” waiting, silent and motionless, for a tourist to venture down; rows of blinding white European bodies in lounge chairs. But there are many more merciless shots of Teresa’s (Margarethe Tiesel) spreading hindquarters, her sagging boobs and her back fat.
She’s casually racist, claiming at first that she can’t tell the men apart. The men pretend to find her appealing just long enough to put the squeeze on her. It’s a long movie, but it doesn’t take long to think that straight-up paying for sex would be far less humiliating for all concerned. But that’s nothing Seidl would sanction, as shown when Teresa’s ghastly resort friends pay for a male stripper for her birthday. The result is a drawn-out scene of excruciating racism and sordidness.
Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.