PARADISE IS BURNING (Mika Gustafson (2023)

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BIANCA DELBRAVO, DILVIN ASAAD AND SAFIRA MOSSBERG IN PARADISE IS BURNING

MIKA GUSTAFSON: PARADISE IS BURNING (2023)

What do you do when mama runs away?

Paradise Is Burning belongs to the category of films about kids forced to fend for themselves. Two recent British examples are Sarah Gavron's 2019 Rocks and last year's Scrapper from Charlotte Regan, a real charmer. Earlier, more seriously artistic treatments of this theme are Andrew Birkin's haunting 1993 The Cement Garden and Hirakasu Koreeda's heartbreaking 2004 Nobody Knows. Paradise Is Burning presents the basic dilemma - kids trying to hide that their parent is gone - in a way that captures well enough the chaos and disorder of three sisters' unbridled summer holiday lives, particularly that of eldest daughter 16-year-old Laura (Bianca Delbravo). Her heavily tattooed arms are a marker of permissive parenting.

Laura has become the de-facto mother for her two younger sisters, 12-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and 6-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg). The three have great chemistry, and by he end have established a feel of strong sibling bonds that probably the young actors themselves had built by then. The point is made that this is a disordered, mostly all-female world that may lack needed boundaries and safety nets, can be dangerous and combative, but a lot of the time is rollicking good fun.

Chaotic action and jerky hand-held photography excel at capturing the spontaneity and indiscipline of this situation. The film is less successful at developing a meaningful line of action or capturing our hearts. Nearly twenty minutes are devoted simply to messing around. It takes that long before the Problem - the call from social services - is presented. On the other hand the director, who comes from documentary work, provides a wealth of little specific details that are well observed. The question is whether quite so much trivia is necessary. Certainly we need to know that Laura has been drawn into clever and not so clever lawbreaking. Scams to get into other people's houses are clever. Shoplifting is not so clever, though the drama staged to get out with a whole cart of groceries, which recalls the drug heist in Gus van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, is sophisticated in its way.

Despite a lot of stalling Gustafson derives good suspense from the impending social services visit from which Laura can't escape so she wants to find someone to impersonate their mother, a possible ploy since the visitor will be a summer temp. She has met a well-off, bored woman called Hannah (the glamorous Ida Engvoll) who is attracted to her wildness when she breaks into her swimming pool. In this relationship, which seems implausible (or perhaps just indefensible), they go on raids where they break into wealthy people's houses using Laura's tricks just to hang out, get high, dance, and read aloud from people's private diaries.

Other characters float around, notably Zara (Marta Oldenburg) — a neighbor who supplies the girls with wine and tampons to Mira when she has her period; the uselessly karaoke-obsessed Sasha (Mitja Siren) and an aunt who is a disinterested carnival worker, the first to refuse Laura's request to impersonate their mom for social services. And then there ate the older girls who are helpful enough to teach the two younger girls, when they're by themselves, to yell four letter words and give the finger. Such training girls-to-girls is perhaps a dubious breakthrough of this film.

The impersonation scheme seems to be a red herring. As Nikki Baughan says in her Screen Daily review, Paradise Is Burning "finds its purpose when only the youngsters are on screen." (Or should she have written "only when"?) Successful sound and editing put us, as Baughan puts it, "right in the middle of this sibling maelstrom." And maelstrom it is, and well evoked. Gustafson shows a lot of talent here, but it seems almost as unbridled as these kids.

Paradise Is Burning/Paradiset brinner, 108 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2023, showing at other important international festivals including Hamburg, London, Chicago, São Paulo, Leiden and others, opening theatrically in multiple European countries in 2024. It opens Aug. 23, 2024 in NYC (IFC Center); comes to LA Sept. 6.