A letter from Chaz | Chaz at Cannes
Audiard's film is muscular and brutal, and the plot points can be about as subtle as Schoenaerts' fists, but I liked this film, and liked watching its characters dance around the improbable details while they found their hearts.
Another film with lots of sex is Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise: Love." It is the first in a trilogy ("Paradise: Love," "Paradise: Faith," and "Paradise: Hope"), with the beginning film set in Kenya. Middle-aged Austrian women, fat and bored, go on vacation to Kenya and try to duplicate men behaving badly. They hook up with virile young Kenyan men and pay to make them their love-toys. The Kenyans call them "Sugar Mamas."
The lead character starts out a bit turned off by this process. She is looking for companionship rather than sex--for someone who wants her for herself. But as she gets more and more involved in the pragmatic reality of the process you see her venal interests become more deviant and demanding until she is not the same woman who arrived at the resort. She becomes rough and rude, and finds out she is still as much alone as ever.
This film is still swirling around in my head and I don't know what I think about it. Some of it was offensive, with the women describing the young African men in supposedly complimentary language, but in actuality in terms that were racist and insensitive.
It should be liberating to see women take sexual control for a change. But I found myself cringing at some of the scenes and thinking that it was as degrading here as it would be for men to be taking advantage of young uneducated girls in Thailand. To be sure, the men were not minors and saw this as a hustle and a way to make money for their families. Perhaps it was the seeming inequality in the economic status or the cultural differences, but it just didn't feel right. Whatever that means.
What did feel "right" was watching the liberation of those bodies on the screen. The zaftig ladies, with stretch marks and hanging bellies and all, reveled in their sexuality! They acknowledged that for the first time they were not worrying about how they looked or whether they were good enough. They didn't make love in the dark, or offer excuses for their aging bodies. They presented themselves just they way they were and allowed themselves to be courted as beautiful and desirable. So what if they paid to hear it? On vacation they didn't have to fear rejection or compete with younger, thinner women for affection.
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