Anna Maria is a woman who is very devoted to Jesus, works as a radiologist and spends her free time going around houses with a statue of Our Lady to convert people to seeking Jesus and escaping from sin.

She has a very intimate relationship with Jesus: she undresses and punishes herself before the crucifix; she believes that too many people are obsessed with sex and therefore wants to free them from hell. She washes the stairs and goes through the whole house on her knees to ask forgiveness for the sins of mankind; she plays the electric organ and sings "beautiful is the earth and the Lord loves her."

She enters homes saying that it is Our Lady who comes to visit them; she makes them pray and blesses them.

In her home there is a group called the "storm troopers of faith."

One day, after two years of absence, she finds her Egyptian husband, a Muslim and in a wheelchair, in the house: his Christianity is put to the test.

He would like to start over, including sex, but she loves only Jesus.

A real struggle to survive living together begins, and she thanks God: the accident has restored his faith.

The second film in the Paradise trilogy (love, faith, hope), while through the religious theme does not hesitate to depict the body and its physicality so far from the canons we are used to from the media. The body is the prime object in Seidl's films, portrayed in its total plastic reality. The script is only tacked on, found and recreated day by day. Like life portrayed with an ever-changing perspective, with an often painful irony and sarcasm filled with tragedy. Seidl's gaze is unflinching, like that of a biologist searching for the crazed cell of his characters affected by metastasis of despair and delusion.

The trilogy is meant to depict the path to finding happiness, "the kit for heaven," as Seidl puts it, all happening through the journey of three women, the first searching for love, the second for faith, the third for hope.

Looking forward to the third episode, the description of an exclusively female path emerges, and so it would be interesting to understand why it is they, the other half of heaven who are still seeking love and faith albeit in these distorted and enchanted forms. Why do they still persist in seeking heaven? Out of naiveté, because they are only now emerging from a "state of minority," because they are not yet immune from the illusion that male disenchantment has historically worked out? It would be interesting to know from Seidl, but with respect to this question, he preferred to decline the answer.

Then again, let everyone find their own through these hyper-realist representations

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice