Paradise
Dir: Michael Almereyda
Rating: 2.0/5.0
Museum of Modern Art
82 Minutes
Blame it on MySpace. Or Twitter. Or any of the other social networking traps that have been at the front of the crusade to make the most ordinary of events seem extraordinary. As a result, there is a wave of films that say and do nothing in a way that could be described as anti-artistic, utilizing the cheapest of digital video and removing all mechanisms of filmmaking- no tripods to keep shots from being handheld disasters, sound taken straight from the inboard mic, framing excised altogether. It’s not Dogme 95, it’s not cinema verite, it isn’t much of anything. And yet some are being heralded as “beautiful,” or “audacious,” turning into the film equivalent of the single blank canvas in the gallery.
Michael Almereyda’s Paradise is the latest of these thoroughly irritating endeavors, a collection of home movies from the filmmaker taken from his trips across the world. The only unifying trait is that more than half of the “scenes” feature children being…children. A kid falls into a fountain after chasing some fish. Another group of kids decide to set a tree limb on fire and then beat it with bamboo while their grandparents look on somewhat helplessly, not even interfering when a little girl breaks a glass bottle. Other scenes revolve around Almereyda wandering aimlessly or voyeuristically taping people, the most noteworthy of these being when a pretty girl on a bus catches his eye and he allows the camera to awkwardly zoom in closer and closer on her, while she seems to notice what he’s doing and feels uncomfortably trapped by it.
Almereyda claims his film is about “moments routinely taken for granted, and always slipping away,” but it feels less like that and more about a director who is rejecting film. As an exercise in dismantling the structure and traits of film, of narrowing it down to a field of observation rather than narrative, it could be interesting. But it’s hard to shake the arrogance of Almereyda’s concept altogether, that somehow the travels of a man affluent enough to go wherever he wants for several years just aimlessly filming should be interesting. There are lives briefly detailed in Paradise that offer far more richness than what Almereyda does focus on- the parties thrown in the wake of Katrina signifying a city trying to ignore the horrors of their world in favor of what they can be thankful for stands out as a key example.
In the context of a gallery, where the work can be seen in snippets and doesn’t demand the viewer’s attention for its entire length, perhaps Paradise could work. As a feature film let loose from the confines of a museum, it’s an offensively self-centered work that confirms the average viewer’s worst fears about documentaries- that they’re boring, pretentious, pointless works that appeal to a select, privileged few.
by Morgan Davis
