‘21 Paraiso’: Seville Review

Dir: Nestor Ruiz Medina. Spain. 2022. 97mins

A grungy, hard-hitting and intimate exploration of that stormy emotional area where the need for love and cash collide, Nestor Ruiz Medina’s feature debut is the very definition of a movie with compelling central idea which it then fails to work through. But despite the weaknesses of its barebones script, this tale of a young couple trying desperately to keep their beach-bum paradise alive hits the emotional spot often enough to make it worthwhile. 

  21 Paraiso is largely improvised; sometimes it’s tedious and meandering, and then suddenly it’s explosive, raw and memorable

21 Paraiso, which premiered in Seville’s New Waves section and will now head to Tallin, is so called because it consists of 21 single takes, shot under challenging conditions in 16mm and prefaced by unnecessary intertitles that come from the lyrics of a not-very-good love song written by Mateo (Fernando Barona). Each section explores a facet of the troubled life of Mateo and Julia (Maria Lazaro), who have gone to live in a beach house in Cadiz province. We first see them making love beneath an iconic poster of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr doing similar in the surf of From Here To Eternity – but the camera pans away to reveal that Julia and Mateo are actually on a low-rent film set they’ve put together: they are filming themselves for Only Fans, the amateur porn website, with Julia acting under the pseudonym of Ginger Judy.

Worked up from a very short script, 21 Paraiso is largely improvised; sometimes it’s tedious and meandering, and then suddenly it’s explosive, raw and memorable. There’s more of the former over the early scenes, as we are treated to a leisurely portrait of the superficial, fragile paradise that Julia and Mateo have made: but things start to turn sour when they reveal the source of their income to a group of conservative-minded and outraged friends, planting – a little implausibly, perhaps – the first seeds of doubt in Julia’s mind. When Julia cuts off her hair, Mateo is initially understanding – but soon their Only Fans page starts shedding subscribers and tensions build between love and money.

It’s an age-old dilemma, but this is a fascinating update. Potentially, 21 Paraiso is a devasting exploration of a contemporary culture in which our bodies, dreams and desires are being cynically mined for cash – not by others but, in the absence of economic alternatives, by ourselves. But the decision to forgo a detailed script and adopt an intimate, fly-on-the wall approach is a high risk one. Too much of the film’s first half lacks tautness and the deeper nuances of Julia and Mateo’s complex situation remain largely unexplored. Dramatically, at least, things pick up over the last half hour, when the characters finally have something to fight for.

Lazaro and Barona do good work, with Lazaro in particular giving the very definition of a committed performance, emotionally and physically: as Ruiz Medina notes in the fim’s press notes, we are more used to seeing people dying on screen than masturbating. But having to work up a story at the same time as creating credible, interesting characters is a tough call. Marino Pardo’s photography uses natural light throughout, superbly capturing the special light of Andalucia at sundown, with its pale beaches, endless dirt tracks, scooters and poverty. It’s a tainted paradise – which may be all that Julia and Mateo were ever destined to be.