MUBI Film Review – A Tiger In Paradise
There’s as moment in A Tiger In Paradise where its subject, Jose Gonzalez, talks about music’s ability to convey mood and atmosphere and how it perhaps isn’t the best vehicle for talking about developments in natural and social sciences. A slightly odd thought, perhaps, but one that sums up the film itself quite nicely: there’s not much in the way of narrative throughline here, but it excels as an intimate portrait of the workings of one man’s mind. It’s quite peculiar but extremely compelling watching.
The film begins with Swedish singer-songwriter Gonzalez – narrating essentially the whole thing himself – talking about his own experience with psychotic breakdowns, which does a pretty good job of letting you know what you’re in for. This is a distinctly subjective film, a journey into his mindset and worldview, with no time for or interest in offering different points of view or keeping a distance from its subject.
Which can be both good and bad depending, appropriately enough, on your own point of view. On the one hand it’s fascinating to have such a deep dive into his brain with no distractions, but on the other it might have been interesting to get more of a sense of how Gonzalez’s wife – for example – feels about his various preoccupations. We do get a glimpse of that in a scene where he’s having a casual conversation with her about existential threats to humanity like nuclear winter, where her combined exasperation and amusement briefly get a chance to shine through.
With a greater objectivity we would almost certainly have lost the occasional fantasy sequences that serve to give us more of a sense of how Gonzalez perceives the world, however, and these are as interesting as they are baffling. Seagulls feature a lot, which he says he thought were “surveillance robots” during one of his psychotic episodes, as do people getting stuck in loops to reflect how he gets hung up on ideas.
One later scene is a beautiful Utopian vision that’s abruptly and harshly interrupted, reflecting his uncertainty about the future and bleak outlook on the state of the world. The film as a whole jumps between scenes featuring his lilting, hopeful music and his existential musings on how we’re all probably doomed, occasionally punctuated further by harsh cuts back to his smoothie maker: a reminder of his obsessive health regimen, a product of his determination to never again have another psychotic break.
It’s a very effective portrait of a deeply anxious mind, flitting between the positive and the negative and never quite sure which is which. He talks about wanting to have a good impact on the world through his music and the impossibility of knowing whether what you do will be for good or ill, and the timelapse footage of how humanity has transformed our planet illustrates this particularly clearly. We thought we were making the place habitable for ourselves and transforming it for the better, but it’s impossible to look at the news and think that project was a success.
A Tiger In Paradise ends on a much more optimistic note however, suggesting that Gonzalez has at least partially conquered his anxieties about what the future holds. The story here is a sketch more than anything else, but the end result is a thoroughly arresting trip inside this man’s head. And in the 2023 canon of journeys to the centre of the mind, it’s certainly a heck of a lot less stressful than Beau Is Afraid. Less than half the length too.
★★★★
A Tiger In Paradise is streaming on MUBI from Friday 8th December.
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