The
word “paradise” usually has nothing but positive associations, but to reach a
Heavenly paradise, you necessarily need to die first, whereas instituting a
utopian paradise on earth invariably involves mass murder and oppression. The
connection between death and idyllic perfection comes through loud and clear in
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.
Jules
is a comfortable but far from compassionate middle-class French police officer
collaborating with Vichy and the National Socialists. Helmut is a young German
nobleman who takes pride in his status, even though it is a source of insecurity
among his working-class SS colleagues. Both men will use their positions to sexually
exploit Olga, an elegant Russian émigré arrested for sheltering Jewish
children. Each will discuss their wartime experiences from a position of definitive
hindsight. That means they are dead, as becomes evident when the resistance
assassinates Jules during the first act. However, you cannot say they share the
same ultimate fates.
In
each case, the imprisoned Olga welcomed her jailer’s attention, as a means of
survival. The outlook for her is especially desperate when she reaches the
concentration camp Helmut is inspecting. Konchalovsky rather sparingly depicts
the horrors of death camp life, but he periodically slaps us with a brutally
intense episode of cruelty. Therefore, we can plainly understand why it is
almost a godsend when Olga reunites with Helmut, a former summer fling, who
became ridiculously enraptured with her. In the intervening years, Helmut drunk
deeply of National Socialism, becoming a hardcore ideologue and anti-Semite.
Yet, he himself readily admits, had he been born in Russia, he would have been
a Communist. Indeed, he quite respects their fanaticism and statism, but those
are not the terms he would use.
Konchalovsky’s
strategy to combine Nuremberg-esque interview segments with dramatic sequences
will be divisive, but it all pays off in the final scene. Even viewers who do
not fully buy into Konchalovsky’s style and structure will concede the power of
Aleksandr Simonov’s frighteningly beautiful black-and-white cinematography.
Like Son of Saul, Paradise is shot in the box-like Academy
ration, but every frame is still visually arresting.
Julia
Vysotskaya (Konchalovsky’s accomplished wife) is also ferociously heartbreaking
as Olga. It is an unflinching, morally complex portrayal of suffering and
survival, but Konchalovsky only invites us to empathize, not to judge. Philippe
Duquesne is fine as Jules, but he never stretches our conception of the corrupt
French copper. In contrast, Christian Clauß is a chilling true believer, but he
also develops disturbingly dysfunctional yet problematically human chemistry
with Vysotskaya’s Olga.
