Review of Artificial Paradises (2012) by Grant S — 08 Jun 2011

Simple, (mostly) non-actors, real, very well done. It's the rainy season in a small village in Veracruz. A young woman, Luisa, stays in a ramshackle motel near the beach run by an older peasant caretaker who gets by smoking marijuana.

Luisa soon uses up the last of her dwindling supply of heroin, and finds a sliver of refuge in the isolated gray as she struggles with both withdrawal and the notion of escape. This is a slow, quiet, and stark visualization of the notions explored by Baudelaire's text of the same title.

This film touches on the alienating impacts of substance use outside the normal urbanized and fast-paced deluge of style and pain we find more often in films like 'Trainspotting,' 'Enter the Void,' or 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

' Instead, this is neither sheen nor horror, simply the calm and slow gaze of an odd search for just such an artificial paradise amid the relentless simplicity of the third-world.