Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/24/19

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

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Paradise: Hope (Ulrich Seidl, 2013)

Cast: Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz, Michael Thomas, Viviane Bartsch, Maria Hofstätter, Leopold Schiel, Rainer Luttenberger, Hannes A. Pendl. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

The third film in Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy completes the story of a family of women: The mother, Teresa, was the focus of Paradise: Love (2012); the aunt, Anna Maria, that of Paradise: Faith (2012); and young Melanie's experiences at a "fat camp" are meant to be taking place at much the same time as Teresa is experiencing pleasures of the flesh in Kenya and Anna Maria is proselytizing for Catholicism in Austria. Like the other two films, Paradise: Hope is scathingly satirical about the inability of human beings to satisfy their wants and live up to their ideals. It's a discomfiting movie, as are the other two films in the trilogy.