Paradise Regained (A Sweet Disaster)

 
Good news - Paradise Regained (ie: the one Sweet Disaster film that I could never track down, either online or as part of any commercial video release) eludes me no more.  I happened to be in London recently, so I took the opportunity to secure a viewing session in the BFI viewing room with the copy that they had in their archives.  A beautifully-preserved copy it was too - crisp, clean and with all of the surrounding Channel 4 idents intact.  And maybe it was just the excitement of the experience or the sheer novelty of finally getting to see the film after all this time, but this might just have been my favourite of the lot, making it a perfectly satisfying instalment to have ended my four-year Sweet Disaster quest upon.  Irony is, for as long as this one has eluded me, I didn't even finish reviewing the four Sweet Disaster shorts that I had seen up until that point.  As it's turned out, I've wound up leaving both films by Andrew Franks (the only director to helm multiple instalments of the Sweet Disaster series) until last.  My review of Conversations by a Californian Swimming Pool is presently on the back-burner, but I thought that I should get my commentary upon Paradise Regained down while the film is still relatively fresh on my mind.

The title "Paradise Regained" is an obvious nod to the John Milton poem originally published in 1671 (the sequel to his earlier epic, "Paradise Lost"), dealing with Jesus's encounters with Satan out in the Wilderness and his triumph over Satan's efforts to have him succumb to temptation (as depicted in the Gospel of Luke).  Franks' film takes place in a wilderness that remains where human civilisation has long since fallen, the victim of nuclear attack, and in which a potential new Eden is apparently enduring, albeit with a sinister undercurrent afoot.  Having now seen all five films in the Sweet Disaster series, I feel confident in categorising Paradise Regained as the strangest of the pentad, in part for the curious juxtaposition it creates between various incongruous elements and imagery - between nature and machinery, life and death, beauty and horror.  Whereas Milton's poem dealt with the redemption of life through the forbearance of Jesus, Franks' film centres on the tension between renewal and oblivion, showing us a world of great visual splendor in which ugliness is also rife; a "paradise regained" not through peaceful resistance but through appalling atrocities, the remnants of which are still visible, and in which the forces of destruction still linger (albeit in rather an unexpected form), the war between elimination and endurance having yet to be completely settled.

For the most part, the film takes place in a forest, against a backdrop of lush, tropical greenery and a soundscape of clicking insects and lively birdsong, although a handful of establishing shots indicate that this ostensibly unspoiled Eden is actually a small pocket of life in a vast post-apocalyptic wasteland spanning the world beyond.  The only remnant of the lost human civilisation (and hint of what may have occupied the wasteland prior to the blast) is a single shopping trolley bearing the sign "must be returned to the store or designated trolley parks".  The forest animation (courtesy of Aardman's Richard "Golly" Golieszowski) is beautiful and richly detailed, so that each shot showing water dripping from the leaves, flowers erupting with bursts of pollen, mist rising through the trees and flashes of overhead lightning conveys a robust and intricate network of life.  Yet mixed in with this sublimity are momentary glimpses of unspeakable horror, notably the remains of a human rib cage seen entrenched in a bubbling bog (the bubbling effect, evidently the result of someone blowing into liquid through a straw, does lend an oddly charming quirkiness to the otherwise bleak implications of this particular image).  The continued survival of the forest amid the remnants of disaster might be read as a testament to the resilience of the natural world, haunting in its indifference toward human suffering, but also inspiring in its ability to endure and keep the cycle of life active.  Unfortunately, there are other forces at work within the forest and, right from the start of the film, a distinctly alien, technological presence is felt, one which seems disturbingly at odds with the natural ambience and suggests the extent to which human activity continues to pervade this world long after humanity's supposed fall.  The opening shots show the fuzzy, colourless perspective of a surveillance camera peering through the trees; as it turns out, this is just one of multiple cameras concealed within the forest, jerkily swiveling in all directions.  The denizens of this world, be they merely shrubs and animals, are being observed with paranoid eyes.

There is another threatening element which pervades the film for its entirety, and that is The Voice.  A loud, bellowing voice (vocal performance by Philip Manikum) is heard ringing out from deep within the forest, announcing, in the manner of a religious sermon, that the Earth, having been cleansed of the contaminating evils of flesh and desire, has been restored to its former state of paradise.  The source of The Voice is not immediately clear, but it transpires that multiple loudspeakers have been affixed to trees, in order to deliver this sermon across the forest.  Destruction, we are told, is faith, death is charity, and the nuclear warfare which has laid waste to the world beyond was the glorious embodiment of divine judgement.  In The Voice's own words, "The armies of God have triumphed, thundering against the sinners, scorching the Earth!  No flesh, sin is extinguished, there is no desire!"  In order to eradicate sin, life too must be completely obliterated.  According to The Voice, "God's solution is the triumph of God over life", for is "life from which comes all madness and treachery, all sin and desire, all pain and anxiety, all lust."  Through these proclamations, The Voice establishes itself as being in opposition to the renewal and endurance of life as embodied by the forest, and it becomes apparent that the unseen forces behind the surveillance cameras have none too good intentions for the inhabitants of this Eden.  One of the cameras suddenly becomes very active and spins around as if detecting some kind of disturbance.  The source of this is eventually revealed to be a tiger lurking in the bushes nearby, seemingly curious as to what the raucous is all about.  At this point, the camera's sinister secret is revealed; it is not merely an instrument of observation, but also a deadly weapon and, having honed in upon its target, it proceeds to open fire (but apparently fails to kill the tiger, which is seen alive in a later shot).

The owner of The Voice is finally introduced through the sudden appearance of a saucer, upon which we see a human hand place a tea cup.  The lack of any corporeal human presence up until now means that this reveal comes of as starting, all the more so for being accompanied by an activity as benignly mundane as drinking tea.  The forces pulling the strings are revealed to be a lone individual, a white-haired man who watches the local environs via multiple surveillance screens.  Behind him sits a tape recorder, its spools turning, for the sermon we hear being broadcast live throughout the forest is actually a recording.  At this stage, the film becomes reminiscent of  Death of a Speechwriter, which also takes place in the aftermath of nuclear attack and which also centres around the juxtaposition of an audio recording with a starkly sinister reality.  Much as the slew of soundbites heard throughout the latter film ultimately accumulate to little more than a slew of meaningless chaos, here there is a definite ridiculousness in the bombast of this white-haired character, as reflected in the reaction of the tiger, who finally slinks away in total indifference.

Ultimately, the white-haired man is rather an absurd figure, exemplified in the entirely one-sided nature of his war on life.  The audience to whom he broadcasts his sermon have no use for or comprehension of any of his words and respond only with their heedlessness, carrying on much as they have always done.  Nevertheless, the manner in which he embraces and positively revels in the destruction which has befallen the world around him do still mark him out as rather a horrifying figure.  In a sly subversion of the Milton poem with which the film shares its name, Christ is worked in here not as a bringer of redemption, but as a signifier of the very heights of this man's lust for annihilation.  He proclaims that "Paradise is regained", and refers not to the continued survival of the forest that surrounds him, but to the devastated wasteland that lies beyond it - as he states, "emptiness is virtue!", and it is through this emptiness, and the perceived cleansing brought about by nuclear warfare, that he anticipates the second coming of Christ.  If the survival of the forest represents an opportunity for regrowth and renewal, then the lust for destruction that he exhibits, along with the religious reverence with which he regards the nuclear annihilation of past, are the serpents of this particular Eden.  When, finally, we see the white-haired man switch off his tape recorder and speak directly into his microphone for the first time, he merely continues the same cycle of phrases which could be heard on the tape recording - "Destruction is faith!  Death is charity!  Paradise is regained!" - with a chilling monotony that causes him to appear as little more than an extension of the machinery with which he has allied himself; a fanatical, eerily mechanical figure acting out an endless tirade against a largely disinterested world.

Paradise Regained closes with a pause from the white-haired man, against which a peaceful ambience of jungle noises is heard, only for the film to cut to a sudden, startling burst of static (much like that frequently seen through the view of the surveillance cameras); a mock-signalling failure that once again evokes the tension between life and oblivion, plunging this "paradise" into total nothingness.