Paradise: Love

Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) (Ulrich Seidl - Austria) 120 minutes

Ulrich Seidl, a man few could accuse of having an overly indulgent view of humanity, tackles for his latest film sex tourism in Kenya (as practiced by women). Laurent Cantet has been here already with his 2005 film Heading South/Vers le sud, which was a credible enough if worthy take on the phenomenon, set at the height of Papa Doc’s terror in 1970s Haiti. Seidl is rather less interested in the phenomenon in a social sense than in how it reduces people to a brutish animalistic level. And there’s plenty of that on display in Paradise: Love; the problem is Seidl seems to be arbitrating such a little too much on both his own drama and argument. There is precious little separation of powers in Ulrich Seidl’s dialectic — the legislature and the judiciary crumple at once in the face of his own capricious executive decisions.

The centre of the drama is Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), a 50-year-old divorcee, who leaves her teenage daughter at fat camp (more of that later) when she heads off on a sand and sun holiday on the Kenyan coast, accompanied by a friend who is already a dab hand at negotiating the informal, unspoken arrangement of renumerated sex with younger African men. Teresa is initially diffident about taking advantage of the situation —  as well she might be — but, this being an Ulrich Seidl film, she’s hardly going to head to Africa to sit on the beach and sun herself innocently, is she?

She soon takes up with Munga, a seemingly kindly Kenyan, who pleasures her but soon begins taking her round to meet his family at work and at play and ‘suggesting’ monetary donations for all manner of things. The Austrian women, though they are outsiders themselves, being  middle-aged and mostly overweight, abandoned by the affections of their husbands and lovers, behave atrociously. They are cruel, crude and barely conceal their racism by speaking in German in front of the Kenyans they mock. With Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke, Markus Schleinzer, Elfriede Jelinek, few countries have been badmouthed so much by their artists as contemporary Austria has been (even if the likes of Jörg Haider, Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil do surface from time to time, as if to prove them right). But Seidl is none too interested in the Africans either; they exist in his narrative to show the Austrians up as incorrigibly horrid and to exact increasingly venal demands themselves.

The film plods on to its inevitably bathetic conclusion, where the microbes in Seidl’s petri dish of disgusting humanity are finally given free rein. Seidl is a talented filmmaker, a brilliant framer of images and it is his assured pacing that manages to keep any interest at all for much of the film. It is his overall conception of drama that is in question — the dripping smugness and contempt is just too hard to take. He is like those people — we all know at least one — who go on Facebook to hector anyone who cares to listen about how nobody is paying any attention whatsoever to the tragedies unfolding in the world as we speak. Seidl thinks he knows something we don’t. Maybe he does, but it’s not a great deal more revelatory than the majority of people that have ever been exposed, however indirectly, to a harrowing experience or monstrous behaviour, might know. Because he is in the narrative business, he believes he is in some more privileged position regarding these uncomfortable truths. And he intends to continue as such: Paradise: Love is the first in a trilogy of (undoubtedly) misanthropic ruminations on the horror that is man. Part two will treat of Teresa’s daughter in her weight-loss retreat. Expect the dignity to be measured out in coffee spoons.

Well at Least He Has His Health...

The superlative and very funny French football magazine So Foot dubbed Group B of this European Championship (the one containing co-hosts Austria, Germany, Poland and Croatia) the 'anschluss group', a delightfully insensitive quip, but which has been proven to be pertinent in the light of events in the past week. While Croatia have been rock solid in defence so far, conceding only a late goal to Germany's Lukas Podolski, one of their countrymen, former Ustashe chief of police Milivoj Ašner let his guard slip by being out and about to enjoy the football in his town of domicile Klagenfurt, where Croatia played their games against Germany and Poland. Ašner, 95, who cunningly goes by the name of Georg Aschner in Austria, escaped extradition to his native land two years ago to be tried for war crimes, as the Austrian government claimed he was in too poor health to stand trial. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has again called on the Austrians to extradite him and that renowned organ of Nazi-hunting, The Sun, has snapped a hale and hearty Ašner with his wife among revelling football fans. Croatia has been criticised for its team's links to far-right groups but the country is surely doing more to atone for a shameful chapter of its past than Austria is by protecting this criminal. I wonder does it have anything to do with Klagenfurt being the home and fief of that pin-up boy of the far-right, Jörg Haider? And I wonder what Mister Ašner's secret for a long and healthy life is?

Sweeter Sixteen

Austria has become the first country to lower the voting age for all elections to 16. I don't see any reason why not, though I cannot imagine teenagers beating down the doors to vote for the first time. Still, a laudable measure and it seems that Ireland is the only country in the EU allergic to the concept of electoral reform.

Vienna Cafés

Vienna still retains many of the old cafés that it was famous for in the Imperial era. The most famous one of these is Café Central, on Herrengasse, which has been a meeting place for intellectuals and politicians since the early 19th century, being located a stone's throw from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It is an impressively plush café divided into two rooms, one of which has a large glass cupola above it that floods the room with natural light. The place is surprisingly comfortable and welcoming for a café of such vaunted reputation and, unlike Parisian cafés of similar renown, is not absurdly expensive. Leon Trotsky, during his pre-revolutionary exile, used to spend a lot of time on the café's red banquettes, chatting about art and literature (but, never, I imagine about politics) under the assumed name Bronstein. According to Claudio Magris, whose section on Vienna in Danube is a superb tour guide to the city, when a Habsburg cabinet minister was informed of the imminent revolution in Russia, he answered: 'And who is going to carry out this revolution? I suppose you're going to tell me that Bronstein, who sits all day in Café Central, is plotting it?'

Café Hawelka, on Dorotheegasse, right up the street from the Dorotheeum, a famous old upmarket pawn shop, is renowned for its intellectual millieu of the 1950s and 1960s. It appeared briefly in the video for Kraftwerk's 'Trans-Europe Express' but according to Martin, a Viennese photographer, whom my friend Ashley put me in touch with, it is overrun with tourists these days. I found this strange as I seemed to be the only non-German speaker there on the two occasions I popped in for a beer, but then I realised that they were German tourists. Apparently the place's cachet across the border is still presitigious. In any case I found it charming, down-at-heel yet fastidious - people in Dublin might think Mulligans crossed with Bewley's - with the waiters all dressed in red evening jackets and it had that most civilised feature of Central European cafés: the newspaper rack with about a dozen papers, in all the major Western European languages. Though Vienna is not the city it was, it still has a hearteningly cosmopolitan outlook.

Last and best of all is the beautiful smokey little Kleine Café, which Ashley, who lived here last year, tipped me off about. Located on Franziskanerplatz, opposite the Franciscan Church, the place is a grubby little comfortable den, with cheap beer and wine, a great place for a drink on a cold night.

The Third Man and Vienna

The Third Man is a cruel tale, not least because the Romantic anti-hero at its centre, Harry Lime, is a far more interesting and more colourful character than his good but undistinguished friend Holly Martins. In a way it is much the same as Graham Greene's other famous tale of beguiling criminality of that era, Brighton Rock, where the hapless reporter Kolly Kibber bears little comparison to the sadistic baby-faced Pinkie Smith. The Third Man is increasingly cruel for Lime's opening narration, delivered from beyond the grave, without a hint of regret and remorse, which sets his poor friend Martins up for an adventure of heartbreaking deception.

Walking around Vienna looking for the various locations of the film, one is struck at how close most of them are to one another; other than the trip out to the Zentralfriedhof (or Central Cemetery) for the two funerals and to the Ferris Wheel on the Prater Stern, the scene of Lime's famous 'cuckoo clock' speech, most of the action takes place in the Innere Stadt. Martins first arrives at Lime's apartment at 5, Josefsplatz, right beside the Spanish Riding School. The building is a neo-classical edifice called the Palais Pallavicini, dating from 1784, the portal of which is flanked by four enormous caryatids. As can be seen in the picture above, the door looks a bit unimpressive at the moment, having been temporarily replaced by a piece of plywood. That Lime should have landed such impressive digs in post-war Vienna is proof of the success of his black-market racketeering, though one imagines that the location was chosen by director Carol Reed as much for its ease of filming as for its impressiveness. The equestrian statue on the square in front is the location for Lime's putative death.

Just around the corner is the Hotel Sacher, behind the Staatsoper, where the Allied command was then stationed, and where Martins meets Trevor Howard's cynical and brusque Captain Calloway, who endeavours to open his eyes to the seamier side of Lime's character. Then a little further north on Nieurmarkt is the café terrace where Martins meets Kurtz, the Romanian confrère of Lime, who says that he may be identified by his 'holding a copy of your [Martin's] book'.

When Lime is chased down by the Military Police in the final reel, he descends into the sewers through a kiosk on Am Hof, which is about half a kilometer west of this; Lime's run through the sewers is not a long one, as he surfaces - or attempts to do so - on Minoritenplatzen, where his fingers slip from the bars of a man-hole grille, as he dies. I have to point out though in extremely nerdy fashion that the grilles on the square today are a lot thicker than the ones that Lime's fingers slip from. It's one of those things you can't help noticing. Thanks to this link for the information.

Sligo's Gift to Central Europe

A man from my beloved Ballymote Eduard Taaffe was twice Prime Minister for the Hapsburgs in the late 19th century. To be completely accurate he was a descendant of the Ballymote Taaffes though he did retain the title Baron of Ballymote, without ever really exercising power in his fief. He was a man whose political liberalism compared very well with other statesmen of that century, particularly with regard to the extension of suffrage and his policies on the Slavic minorities. His ancestor Nicholas Taaffe, the 6th Viscount, who was born in Ballymote, is credited with introducing the potato to Silesia in 1763. Who would have thought that a Sligoman should be indirectly responsible for that staple of Central European cuisine: the potato dumpling?

Viennetta

I was warned not to expect too much craic in Vienna and it does not have the most obvious allure of a party town. In fact it is literally the quietest city I've ever been; even on Saturday afternoons while walking among dozens of people in the city centre the predominant sound is one of trams gently humming as they make their way along the Rings. The scale of the city is also a big excessive, or at least for its present situation. The grandeur and pomp of Vienna dates from a time when it was the capital of an Empire that stretched from what is now northern Italy to the Black Sea. Vienna was the centre of it all and that grandeur far better suited such a large trans-national Empire than it does a relatively small modern-day Central European republic. In this way it is similar to Trieste, its former chief port, which I visited last year, and which also lost its significance after the break-up of the Empire in 1918. If Vienna were a company it would have downsized; if it were a stately home it would have opened its doors to the rabble of the general public. Though, then again, Vienna has done that; it is effectively a museum city, most of the huge buildings that it has inherited from the Hapsburg era no longer as vital as they once were. The adverts on the U-Bahn for the Museum of the Imperial Palace (pictured) state 'We don't have aristocrats, just their jewels', which carries a faint note of regret as well as impudence.

But the Austrians are not unduly nostalgic for the Empire, one which was probably the most tolerant and enlightened of the European empires (Joseph Roth prophesied correctly that the protection the Jews enjoyed under the Hapsburgs, would soon crumble as the old hatreds of Europeans gentiles were again unleashed). Compared to the Turks and the Spanish (or at least the right wing in those countries) there is no infantile breast-beating about the long-lost historical might of the Austrian Empire. They are content with their modest, extremely well-administered Republic yet the street names are all the same from Imperial times, and there is no iconoclastic bent among present-day Austrians. Some people argue that the country has yet to come clean on its support for the Nazis, which may be true, but its Imperial past is something to be much less ashamed of.