Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
Sisters live a summer idyll without adult supervision
By Nora Lee Mandel
PARADISE IS BURNING (Paradiset brinner)
Directed by Mika Gustafson
Written by Mika Gustafson and Alexander Öhrstrand
Produced by Nima Yousefi
Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Finland. 108 mins, in German with English subtitles. Not Rated.
With: Bianca Delbravo, Dilvin Asaad, Safira Mossberg, Ida Engvoll and Marta Oldenburg
Room 8 Films releases in NYC on August 23 at IFC Center and September 6 in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal and Glendale.
Paradise is Burning portrays a summer idyll as an ideal ode to freedom for three sisters living at home without adult supervision. For all the sororal affection and female bonding rites of a mostly sex-segregated, working-class environment in a small Swedish city’s suburb, they are just as prone to drinking, bullying, fighting, petty criminal schemes, and homoerotic attraction as their male counterparts have been portrayed in films.
Morning chaos in their messy house seems typical for 16-year-old “Laura” (Bianca Delbravo), 12-year-old “Mira” (Dilvin Asaad) and seven-year-old “Steffi” (Safira Mossberg), even if it’s a last day of school before summer vacation. Neighboring grocer “Zara” (Marta Oldenburg) won’t let tattooed “Laura” buy more detergent on credit and the local laundromat manager chases her away from trying to pilfer again. “Steffi” knows to find their mother’s driver license for “Laura” to copy the signature for a school attendance note.
“Laura” has barely dropped them off before she has to intervene in “Mira”s schoolyard fight, by beating up the bully. Little “Steffi” is worried about her first loose tooth, but knows how to create a loud distraction at a supermarket, so her sisters can quickly push out a full grocery cart without paying.
The missing mother seems to be like who the English call “a traveler”. “Laura” takes her sisters by train to a carnival. She leaves them to find their unsurprised “Aunt Vera” in a RV out back: How long has she been gone this time? - and warns they’re leaving next week, so can’t run interference with social services.
Back home, they hang out with girls (including a pregnant one) at a favorite activity of sneaking into backyard pools of middle-class homeowners, which always seem to end up with taunts and fists. “Laura” is soon coping with “Mira”s first period, leaving product explanations to “Zara”, who offers Congratulations? Or condolences? The neighborhood women make up for the absent mother by staging a raucous ritual celebrating her life cycle passage.
To “Mira”s rising resentment, “Laura” leaves her sisters more and more to spend time with their new middle-class neighbor “Hannah” (Ida Engvoll). In exchange for pretending to be their mother to the summer temp social worker, “Hannah”, who has apparently left her husband and baby, follows her fascination with “Laura”, not just in being mentored how to trespass inside upscale houses and apartments.
Though this messily exuberant film does not have the male gaze of Bergman’s Swedish idyll Summer With Monica (1953), Mika Gustafson’s debut feature is not quite sui generis she claims in focusing on girls’ coming of age on their own. The universality of this youthful portrait has many antecedents. For example, the devoted sisters battling class conflicts were seen in the long-running U.S./U.K. TV series Shameless (streaming on various services). The frenetic cinematography following the sisters is similar to British director Andrea Arnold’s girls on-the-road American Honey (2016). The young women in the German The Edukators (2004) are as transgressive, but believe rebellious tactics are for political purposes.
Everyone wants freedom from housekeeping chores.
8/21/2024
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
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