Paradise: Love

Teresa is a fat 50-year-old woman from Austria. She has a challenging and obese daughter.

At the suggestion of an enthusiastic frequenter friend, she sets off for Kenya.

Costei is a sugar mama: literally translated it would be "sweet mama."

In slang "Suga Mama" is a woman who supports her boyfriend/partner, he reciprocates with sex. The friend enjoys having sexual encounters with local young men and spurs Teresa to do the same.

From the first failed attempt due to modesty and not feeling comfortable, she will come to the acquisition in a short time of a discreet familiarity with those black and young bodies at the disposal of the ladies.

A lonely woman Teresa, seeking "love" or perhaps just companionship asks the young man on duty to be gentle and perhaps even romantic in touching her.

The demand for money from these guys will be constant and obsessive, not only on the beach, where they try to sell any kind of product, but also outside and after the sexual services: the list of economic and health problems seems to be unending.

A vicious circle is created: an addiction on the part of these women to be compensated for their loneliness through the exploitation of the poverty of these young people who in turn do not hesitate to claim even violently the economic compensation that this type of "collaboration contract" demands.

It is the day of Teresa's birthday, who is waiting in vain for a phone call from her daughter: her friends show up in her room with a present, a very young black, curvy, and delicate boy who will be paid to undress and have an erection under solicitation from the ladies present.

Obsessed, as women, with their physical flaws, they will not be slow, however, to adopt vulgar, disrespectful, racist, and humiliating attitudes.

Nothing new for the "oldest profession in the world," as they say in many.... except that in this case the bodies used as a pure medium are males.

Women are "the end-users" as in "Toward the South," by Laurent Cantet, who had already dealt excellently with this theme, treated in Paradise:love without censorship, by Ulrich Seidl, a documentary filmmaker who witnesses the theme without half-measures.

Only economic and psychological slavery triumphs, behind the guise of sexual freedom and choice. In our pseudo-emancipated societies, what passes from hand to hand is only exploitation: one exchanges what is most personal and confidential there like sex for the most impersonal element that is money.

The merit of this film-documentary is to make us reflect on the subject of prostitution through another subject, that of women-a new way of looking at something that perhaps only with a new look can we reevaluate. Rethinking sex and hunger, lies and illusion, love and survival.

The money that structures social relations becomes a system and this kind of society spreads where individuals can meet only as representatives of money as in prostitution and all things can be exchanged as social relations.

If, as Sartre said shame is not the feeling of being this or that objectifiable object but in general of being an object that is, of recognizing myself in that degraded, dependent and crystallized being that I am to others....

Of all human relationships prostitution is perhaps the most pregnant case of mutual degradation to the condition of pure means, G. Simmel said, and Ulrich Seidl tells it perfectly.