Carmen (Daniela Rincón) and Alfredo’s (Andrés Almeida) departure for Mexico City was supposed to be a new start, a metaphor for upward mobility for this suburban middle-class family. Indeed, Alfredo was hired as the IT guy at a bank in the capital. The new life they are about to begin is however far from what they expected: the quiet and warm family life that the couple has always had and yearned for is just the opposite of what they will find in the metropolis.

Is it really necessary to specify that Carmen and Alfredo are overweight? At first sight, weight problems and self-acceptance seem to be the main topics of the movie: their arrival in town goes hand in hand with a form of violence the couple has never experienced. Therefore during the first bank party, Carmen overhears cruel gossip about her and Alfredo in the restrooms. The movie actually relies on a strong opposition between the suburbs and Mexico City. The city embodies and exhibits all the obsessions with appearance of contemporary societies and is therefore portrayed as a discriminatory space: the division of space, its geometry, tends to convey the invisible boundaries at work in the public space. The shot composition is, from this point of view, very relevant: throughout the movie, the frame-within-the-frame effects cleverly emphasize loneliness and inequalities. The barbwire cage in which Carmen hangs out the wash on the roof, or the use of windows as space dividers, are as many examples of such a technique. The cross-cutting between Carmen’s life, wandering through the city, and Alfredo’s, also reveal their loneliness. So, in many ways, Paradise highlights the links between the city lifestyle, and social dislocation. The scenes in the sports hall or in the mall therefore depict the city as a vitrine of individualism. Carmen’s family and the cooking club she takes part in later, on the contrary, balance and challenge this model. They are indeed smaller social circles, ways out of the city.

Not only does Paradise concentrate on weight and self-acceptance; it is about the interactions between individual and social bodies in the city space, highlighting the phenomenons of social segregation through the metaphor of weight. As every emerging country, Mexico has known a fast urbanization over the few last decades, leading to inequalities and social segregation. Carmen and Alfredo, who are from Satélite, a Mexico City suburban area, perfectly embody this middle-class yearning for better living conditions in the Mexico of the 2010s. All the love issues and trials they go through go hand in hand with of the struggle of becoming city-dwellers, in a way. So Paradise is, in the end, an interesting movie with several levels of understanding, bringing together social and sentimental issues in a clever way.