The most annoying thing about FFF is their lack of any articulated political agenda
SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: When I lived in Berlin, I used to see the Fuck For Forest people around from time to time—usually at clubs like Kit Kat and Berghain: often talking with others, though sometimes lingering on the fringes of the action, looking rather more wary than their reputation might lead one to expect. Two Norwegians, Tommy Hol Ellingsen and Leona Johansson, they’d first come to attention when they had sex onstage during a rock festival in Kristansand, back in 2004, supposedly to raise awareness of ecological issues. Facing legal action from the Norwegian authorities, they soon relocated to the rather more liberal climes of Berlin, and set up a website selling videos and photos of themselves naked, having sex together and with others; all donations would go to protect rainforests around the planet.
This documentary’s one inspired decision is to consider this movement (which, really, is Ellingsen and Johansson, plus a few assorted hangers-on) from the point of view of an outsider: specifically, Danny, who travels to Berlin from Bergen, wanting to join these 'erotic activists’. He’s clearly something of a troubled soul, a high school drop-out and onetime champion showjumper who turned away from the sport (the cruelty to the horses, he claimed, was too intense) without having anything else much to turn to. Confused by his own sexuality, he’s at odds with his family, directionless, depressed.
Before long he’s crashing at their Neukölln apartment with the others, strumming a battered acoustic guitar, indulging in some listless group-sex, and dressing like the bloke out of Haysi Fantayzee. ('All my clothes are from the trash,’ he announces proudly—and, style-wise, this doco could serve as a 83-minute version of Vice Magazine’s Don’ts.) What Danny wants, exactly, remains ambiguous—at least, to himself. ('Look happy,’ he mutters to himself, even as Leona photographs a nude, shivering boy a few metres away.) But not to the viewer, for whom his hunger for acceptance, his desire to be useful to some purpose greater than himself, is as transparent as one of Leona’s blouses.
For the principals, however, the whole issue is rather more fraught. Leona and Tommy are no longer a couple—she ended it after seven years, claiming she’d 'prefer to be unattached'—and are therefore forced to find others to perform sex-acts for the members-only portion of their website. And just as the very suitability of a porn site as a vehicle for social change raises all manner of issues—questions of exploitation, of gender-representation, of queer identity—to which neither of them appear to have given much thought, before long the viewer realises their entire vision of a sexually-positive, eco-conscious utopia is irreconcilable with the means by which they’ve chosen to achieve it.
For Leona, in particular, everything is Content. There’s no joy taken in the hedonism she espouses, nor any moment of genuine submission to it, since she’s constantly outside of the action, either filming it or staging it or simply working out, in her head, how these little spasms of liberation might be monetised. All for the greater good, of course—the group claim to have raised 'millions of Euros’ to aid environmental charities—but you have to wonder at an advocate of sensual pleasure who appears to derive no direct pleasure from her work.
Polish filmmaker Michal Marczak tags along on various FFF actions and outings, and provided you can stomach his somewhat superfluous English-language voiceover—which is distinguished by an odd Liverpudlian inflection; he often sounds like Peter Serafinowitz doing an impression of Ringo Starr—the result is amusing enough: a protest march that threatens to turn ugly when the crew are confronted by some (surprisingly reasonable) cops. A dismal musical performance in a bar. A public fuck in a gallery space, watched by chattering denizens of the city’s alt scene, that’s no more or less explicit (or enervating) than any other Berlin performance-art piece.
For a while the film is simply this: a perhaps overly-affectionate study of a particular strain of hippie positivism, complete with the requisite airy generalities. (Their primary mission, Tommy explains, none too confidently, to Danny, is about 'how to make ourselves more free. That’s important for us. But also, to get in touch with nature again . . . because nature is free.’) The most annoying thing about FFF is their lack of any articulated political agenda, beyond the right to dress unbelievably badly and to make terrible music and visual art. But so what? Berlin—like the Brooklyn it increasingly resembles—is full of lousy art. They’re harming nobody.
But then the story takes a sideways step, as the crew journey to South America—and specifically, a stretch of Amazonian rainforest along the Peruvian-Brazilian border. They’re there for typically noble reasons—they want to open a dialogue with local farmers, in order to generate sustainability projects—but quickly find that their cloistered brand of activism is dramatically unsuited to real-world dilemmas. The locals take these dreamy outsiders to task for their refusal to commit to any concrete agenda, their economic naiveté, and, most damningly, for representing precisely the kind of European paternalism which has traditionally kept these natives poor and dependant. (You also sense, beneath the surface political quarrels, a profoundly Catholic distaste on the part of the farmers for the 'immorality’ these free-loving visitors represent—a suspicion only sharpened by a shot of them doing stretching exercises, naked, in a field, while goggle-eyed children of the locals look on.)
A town hall meeting with the locals, where Tommy expounds at length on the importance of expressing sexuality openly, since it is 'the life-creating force of the universe’, goes especially badly. One local man starts yelling at them: what they need, here, are people who can offer them actual jobs, or create comprehensive reforestation programmes—not NGOs offering vague platitudes. ('This poverty,’ he declares, 'will last all our lives. We will be exploited all our lives.’) The Fuckers, of course, have no idea how to respond. In the end, in a final, crushing irony, they’re replaced onstage by a local salesman, offering discounts on chainsaws.
But here, unfortunately, is where the film misses its greatest opportunity to actually say something, since Marczak refuses to take a position on his subjects, or their goals, or the distance between them. He simply watches as the trip—and the group—unravels. Which is entertaining, in a blackly comic way, but not especially illuminating. In the end, one is left only with an impression of redundancy, and of the limits of something. Idealism, perhaps—or usefulness.
