How much pain and injustice must one suffer to become radicalized? I’m not talking about Twitter liberals, but actual political radicalization. Radicalization, by definition, requires action: war-time Maoism, Extinction Rebellion (XR), the Jenin Brigade. Netflix, following last year’s French revolution film Athena by Romain Gavras, attempts to return to this same question in the German sci-fi film Paradise. And like its French predecessor, Boris Kunz’s first feature in more than a decade concludes with a familiar whiff of neo-liberal problematics and solutions (accompanied by less flashy filmmaking than Gavras’s film).
The premise is instantly intriguing: the ultra-bad biotech company AEON has innovated a way to transfer years from one’s life expectancy to another. Max (Kostja Ullmann) is the “donor broker” of the year—he’s the very best at negotiating lives from his customers, convincing the poor to sell their years to the rich. The very soul-crushing spirit of capitalism is made visceral. In my favorite clever bit, a television news report informs its viewers that the rich successfully teamed together to solve the climate crisis and stabilize the environment after recognizing they will be here for quite a bit longer.
Max isn’t rich, though; he’s a willing member of the petite bourgeoisie at best, a blind instrument of the plutocracy. Financial disaster disrupts his life and he discovers that his wife put 40 years of her life as collateral on their apartment. In the face of the event, he responds with individualized, decisive, violent action. He becomes, for a moment, a man with one purpose: to return his wife’s life. The petite bourgeoisie has become a soldier of revolt, armed and ready to take down AEON.
Except, not really. Just like Athena, the film justifies and explains away the contradictions of potential and actual violence with reactionary politics. Multi-billion dollar corporations aren’t inherently corrupt; there are just bad ideas and bad seeds. Radical politics aren’t liberal, so we must de-radicalize the motives of the action (though not necessarily the actions themselves) to pacify any and all political emotions. The cinematically approved political solutions to the sci-fi problem are more in line with George Bush or Elizabeth Warren than they are with Malcolm X, Slavoj Žižek, or even Cornel West.
As high-concept sci-fi, Paradise somewhat atones for its lack of a political imagination. There is no better way to tell a story in this world than on a small scale. The non-stop digital advertisement of the production design and cinematography presents a Times Squareification of the world: in a world where one biotech company has sole control over the most important commodity in the world, it comes as no surprise that advertisements have become an integral part of one’s experience of the world even more so than in our own. Everything that colors the world is digital, complementing the immaterial and disconnected nature of life-stealing.
What’s the German state doing in all of this? Apart from lending a few counter-terrorism experts, nothing really. They don’t even hover around in the background, nor is state power ever truly felt. Kunz, who also wrote the screenplay, much like the Resident Evil franchise imagines a future controlled by corporate plutocracy rather than state and multinational powers. Unlike that franchise, he responds not with socialism (or anarchism) but with a more excitable form of status quo politics.
Paradise
2023
dir. Boris Kunz
117 min.
Streaming on Netflix Thursday, 7/27.
