The opening shot of Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise: Faith” is both a character sketch and a warning. A woman enters a spartan room, partially disrobes, and kneels before the crucifix on the wall. She then whips herself across the back with a crude cat-o-nine-tails. At length.
That’s the warning part: Seidl is serving notice that “Paradise: Faith” will be a test of endurance, and not for the faint of heart. (The movie’s the middle installment of Seidl’s “Paradise” trilogy, bracketed by “Paradise: Love” and “Paradise: Hope”; they are slightly but not significantly related.)
The woman is Anna Maria, played by the extremely brave Maria Hofstatter. After our startling opening glimpse of her, we see her as a neatly-coiffed medical technician, beginning a staycation during which she’ll trudge though Vienna neighborhoods carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary and buttonholing strangers about joining the ranks of her extreme Catholic sect.
Seidl frames her world as perfectly symmetrical, an order upset when her husband (Nabil Saleh) returns after a couple of years away.
He is Muslim and also paraplegic, and his assumption of his marital place upsets Anna Maria’s tightly-wound existence. The movie whipsaws between unpleasant domestic scenes and unpleasant missionary doorbelling, with the occasional break for Anna Maria’s ecstatic and occasionally blasphemous worshiping of her savior.
This is one of those movies that inspire concern for the actors on screen. From the very first moments, I was worried about Hof-statter’s well-being (that cat-o-nine-tails must be fake — er, right?), and some of her punishingly long scenes with other actors are the stuff of welts and bruises, to say nothing of nightmares.
In a different kind of movie — maybe one in which some measure of sympathy was afforded the characters — Seidl’s unblinking depictions of brutality might lead us into a deeper understanding of this world and whatever issues have led these people to their extremes.
Or maybe to some wildly imaginative fablelike zone, as in Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves,” to name another movie that mashes up faith and punishment.
But in “Paradise: Faith,” the insights get muddied in the nail-on-the-head cruelty — it’s an interesting film to think about, but grueling to sit through.
“Paradise: Faith” (two stars)
Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl puts his actors (and the audience) through a grueling endurance test in this muddied look at a religious fanatic (brave performance by Maria Hofstatter) going through some very unpleasant experiences. This is the middle part of a trilogy, though the films are mostly unrelated. In German, with English subtitles.
Rated: Not rated; probably NC-17 for nudity, violence.
Showing: SIFF Cinema Uptown.
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