Paradise 2007

Hans and Kerstin have been married for 65 years and they've reached a quirky mutual accommodation.  Jazzhead Hans won't row Kerstin to the island to pick berries, but he will try to bake her a surprise sponge cake while she's out.  As it turns out, Hans is even less expert a cook than Kerstin is a rower, but the gesture is appreciated nonetheless.  It's a delight to see this eighty-something couple badger and complain with obvious affection, but after a lifetime of understanding they seem to reach an impasse when Hans decides to create a garish feature wall where Kerstin prefers to display an ancient tapestry woven by her grandmother.

The way in which this battle of wills unfolds is surprisingly suspenseful (No! not the yachting mural!) and wonderfully comic.  When one of their adult children is callled upon to arbitrate, his response is a wise "whatever. . . ."  The scenes in which the elderly couple grumpily ‘co-operate' at paperhanging gracefully courts disaster like a classic Buster Keaton routine, and there's a brilliant twist waiting to surprise us.  The film is so beautifully constructed and exquisitely ‘performed' that it's hard to believe it's a documentary.  Director Jerzy Sladkowski had previously documented Hans and Kerstin in his 1999 film Swedish Tango (also in the festival), and this long-term relationship between filmmaker and subjects is what allows this film to be so incredibly intimate.

For such a short, straightforward film, Paradiseis extremely rich.  Initially, the title seems clearly symbolic, or clearly ironic, but it's actually the name for the wallpaper pattern fatefully chosen by Hans.  At one point, Hans suggests that the moral of the story is: "If you want your marriage to last, don't let your wife help with the wallpapering."  But there are plenty of other lessons we can draw from the film, foremost among them the longterm benefits to a relationship of mutual disrespect (which, at such close range, looks pretty much the same as its opposite) and a powerful sense of humour. — AL