Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/20/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Paradise: Faith (Ulrich Seidl, 2012)

Maria Hofstätter in Paradise: Faith

Cast: Maria Hofstätter, Nabil Saleh, René Rupnik, Natalya Baranova, Trude Masur, Dieter Masur, Michaela Hurdes-Galli. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

Ulrich Seidl's intermittently fascinating, intermittently shocking, and even sometimes tedious Paradise: Faith is the middle film in his Paradise trilogy. It focuses on Anna Maria, the sister of the central character in Paradise: Love (2012) and the aunt of the teenager in Paradise: Hope (2013). Anna Maria is a religious zealot, who totes around a statue of the Virgin Mary while making door-to-door calls on strangers whom she persuades (sometimes) to pray with her. Her home is meticulously clean and adorned only with crucifixes, before which she prays and sometimes flagellates herself -- and with one of which she performs a sexual act. Before long, we discover that she's married to a Muslim, though we never quite find out how that happened. Seidl's distancing from his characters allows us a lot of latitude in judging them, so the film is as much a provocation -- an opportunity for us to assess our responses to such religious extremism -- as it is a portrait of faith.