The opening scene of Paradise :
Love is one that shows a number of developmentally disabled young adults
driving bumper cars at an amusement park. The camera lingers on them for quite
a while, as they gleefully scoot around the floor, unaware of the power that
the cars give them, just having one hell of a good time. Before this
degenerates into crashes and bullying and bad feelings, a caregiver calls a
halt to the outing and everyone gets up and leaves.
This sort of happy ending eludes the caregiver herself, when
she embarks upon her own private amusement park, a beach resort in Kenya complete
with rent boys. At first she’s titillated and amused, with a dash of delighted
horror, when a fellow Eurohag tells her of the special extracurricular
activities that lie in wait for her. This hausfrau is initially enchanted by
monkeys on her balcony, the sight of beach and sea, the pleasures of cigarettes
and cocktails beneath palm trees and the open sky. There’s a sweetness to her
pleasure upon arrival; her broad and simple smile, her wide, blue stare, the
unashamed bulges of her exposed flesh. She’s a woman without artifice, not
particularly bright, who’s thrilled to be on holiday.
But she’s being singled out as an unattached source of ready
money. Whisked off by an enterprising charmer, she ends up fending off his unsophisticated advances in a stark little room. Later she asks her compatriots, all women of a
certain age, all well aware of the fleshly delights that surround them, “Don’t
you just wish someone would look into your eyes?”
The lady wants romance, she wants to be desired, she wants
her middle-aged fantasies to come true. The man of her dreams rescues her from
a crowd of importunate beach vendors, assures her that she is special,
beautiful, alluring. And for a brief moment she is. Her pink, floppy flesh
takes on true loveliness as she lies naked in a post-coital nap. Her smile is
radiant. She wanders hand in hand through a beach village with a truly gorgeous
man who has chosen her, who has absorbed her lessons in the art of tender
seduction, who looks into her eyes. Then he begins the long litany of family
disasters that require money—her money and lots of it. When his “sister” turns
out to be his wife, paradise begins to curdle around the edges.
Deprived of romance, the hausfrau becomes a harpy. A series
of harrowing scenes showing how thoroughly power corrupts become increasingly
difficult to watch. Finally the woman who had happily shared a soapy shower
with a bedmate, gleefully cleaning and being cleaned, ends up barking orders at
the man of the minute, telling him to bathe thoroughly as she waits, sprawled
on a bed, drunken and sweaty in her stained and crumpled dress.
Sex tourism has been insufficiently examined, and rarely
from the female point of view. The parameters of the sex trade have been
defined by men, and, like it or not, they have made a fairly straightforward
business of it. Money changes hands, love is not required, romance is
unnecessary. The male flesh is willing and the female flesh is able to pretend.
