(Finland, 82 min.)
Written and directed by Petri Luukkainen
“Things won’t make a home. It has to come from somewhere
else,” says Petri’s grandma more than once during their visits that appear
throughout Petri Luukkainen’s documentary My
Stuff. My Stuff, which screens in
Ottawa Wednesday night at the Canadian Film Institute’s Bright Nights
Baltic-Nordic Film Festival, sees the young filmmaker go on a Morgan Spurlock-y
quest of self-examination. Petri visits his grandmother frequently to seek her
age-old wisdom and non-judgemental candor while undergoing an odd system of
soul-searching that forms the study of My
Stuff. Petri has decided to purge himself of all his material possessions
and reclaim one item from storage per day for all three hundred and sixty five
days of the year. It’s as extreme and interesting a challenge as it sounds.
Petri’s challenge comes as a response to the emotional vacuum in which he finds himself following a break-up and other personal struggles. His life was filled with things, he says to the camera, but it felt empty. He therefore strips his apartment down past its bare necessities—even the refrigerator, bed, and blinds are removed—to give himself a fresh start. He has not even a single pair of underwear as he streaks buck-naked from his apartment to the storage locker to retrieve his first reward for the first day of filmmaking. Undies, surprisingly enough, aren’t pulled from the locker until, wait for it… the seventeenth day!
Petri’s minimalist challenge is often a surprising one. A
viewer might be taken aback by seeing how easily a person gets on without
household items that seem essential. Petri’s refrigerator, for example, is
easily replaced by a windowsill that can preserve foodstuff in the air of the
cold Finnish winter. On the other hand, a few nights of restless sleeping make
the return of Petri’s futon a joyous affair. The challenge in My Stuff, unsurprisingly for a premise
prompted by a break-up, is often a poignant
reminder of the things we take for granted.
An everyday comfort for one person becomes a luxury for another
as Petri evolves through a journey of “have and have not”. My Stuff is at its most surprising when Petri’s challenge reveals
the social restrictions a person faces in the absence of material things. Petri’s
first week in the challenge is one of seclusion, as his nudity obviously prevents
him from strutting out and joining his pals at the pub. He doesn’t leave his
house except to get an item a day, but even the heavy overcoat he grabs as his
first prize, which also doubles as a sleeping bag, pillow and towel, isn’t
enough by conventional standards. Going to work is equally challenging, for it
takes a few days to amass enough gear to put on a professional appearance.
Another rule of the challenge is that Petri can’t buy anything
during the year. He can make do only with the items at his disposal. My Stuff thus shows how much a person
can be restricted by a lack of access to resources, as his own transportation
throughout the city, as are he means of work, hygiene, and health. Things—objects—rule
mobility and personal growth. Petri never addresses directly the elements of
social determinism connoted in the materialist bent of contemporary culture—especially
western culture—but one can observe from his own seclusion and restlessness how
much people are slaves to stuff.
My Stuff also
finds a middle ground in the collection of material things by noting a midpoint
where Petri’s picks from the storage locker go from necessities to niceties. “I
need about a hundred things,” he says, although the remaining days of the
challenge also reveal how a person might not “need” something like a painting
or a record album, but how such things do afford some mental balance and relief.
My Stuff speaks to people of Petri’s
generation who have been reared on a culture of consumerism, but now find
themselves in a changing social landscape where there seems to be a tension
between a society that places an increasing value on stuff—for example, it’s no
longer enough to have a computer: one also needs a laptop, a tablet, an iPod,
and a smart phone—and the increasingly reality that young adults are expected
to be on top of consumer culture in a dwindling economy that offers them fewer
jobs and opportunities that actually afford the means of providing such stuff. There
is a freedom felt in My Stuff when
Petri putters about his apartment to the film’s jazzy score. He isn’t weighed
down by all his needless baggage, but he also finds a learning curve that
teaches viewers the practical element of needing enough to get by.
“What you own isn’t a measure of your happiness,” notes
Petri’s sensible grandma during another of their visits. She observes Petri’s
arc throughout the journey, as his attempt to fill his emptiness with things
hardly brings him to his desired happy place. Budding personal relationships,
or the times spent with friends and family, are far more valuable, as Petri’s
storyline with his grandmother, which is arguably the film’s greatest strength,
puts him on a parallel challenge of decluttering her life when her things are
no longer needed.
Having fewer things in one’s life is also a social affair. This
element of the challenge essentially forms the crux of Petri’s argument in My Stuff. Without undies, pants, or
credit cards, Petri relies on his friends and family to pitch in and
participate in the project. Sharing stuff is a social affair just as much as it
is a practical one: borrowing tools and whatnot allows for interaction, while
overloading with things can make a person a desk fixture, rather than a social
butterfly unencumbered by baggage. This smart, humorous documentary is a relatable
lesson on the need to purge oneself from the ideology of materialism and see
that the true hallmarks of success aren’t the stuff we can just store away. A
ticket to this fun, jazzy, and insightful doc should be the one bit of “stuff”
you enjoy all day.
Rating: ★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)
My Stuff screens at the Bright Nights Baltic-Nordic Film Wednesday,
Feb 5 at 9:00pm at Library and Archives Canada.
Click here for the
full festival line-up and please visit www.cfi-icf.ca
for more information.
