SXSW 2021 | It's All Meta and Multiplicity in "Fucking With Nobody"
7/12 ForReel Score | 3/5 Stars
A couple nights ago, I was trying to be spontaneous while seated next to my girlfriend and wearing some goofy glasses, so I took out my phone and snapped a quick selfie. The lighting and the angles were right, as they say, and so the picture of us didn’t turn out half bad. “Send me that!” my girlfriend said, and she got to work making the image Instagram-ready – adding the filter, the caption, and so forth. Essentially, we collaborated in “directing” our public image.
This is the same phenomenon that is exploited, inverted, and exploded in the deliriously meta Fucking With Nobody, a treatise on social media, the grooming of modern relationships, and “woke” sexual politics from Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru. In the film, Hauru plays her same-same-but-different self, Hanna, a filmmaker who is denied the chance to direct a prominent vampire feature, and so retaliates with her friends and cohorts by “directing” a phony relationship that involves her and one of her gay actor friends, Ekku. With carefully curated Instagram feeds, YouTube videos, and staged public appearances, the troupe launches a “social anarchist art project” that gains a sizable following. All starts as good fun and innocent experimentation, of course, but later, the project begins to blur the lines between what is real and what is the art.
If this all sounds exceedingly indulgent and pretentious, that’s because it is. But that’s always been the point with social media and idea of social media as a medium. The content we create is escapism, the escapism becomes real; the art that examines this content deconstructs this evolution, or amalgamates a new social media selfhood. Fucking With Nobody works both objectives, while also twisting its way through the meta-narrative of the filmmakers’ quest to find authenticity and reinvent their own medium.
In attempting something that is equal parts audacious and cringe, Fucking With Nobody is equal parts exhilarating and confounding. For all of its sharp turns and dead-ends, though, there are continual rewards waiting for the viewers willing to hang on. The editing, for one, it unquestionably sharp. Hauru skips dexterously between cinema verité-style footage, iPhone captures, and traditionally cinematic looking dream sequences in ways that give her film both momentum and a feeling like it operates on its own disobedient accord. Creative flourishes with filters and textural sounds give scenes a pop-ish buoyancy. In addition, there is gutsy commitment from all the players involved – it is a sincere treat to watch a film that in and of itself has a spirit of community.
But while the dynamism of Fucking With Nobody remains consistent throughout, the ideas unfortunately begin to sputter out by the final act. Hauru begins to retread concepts to less than thrilling effect, and other narrative threads—such as the characters of Hanna’s employer and Hanna’s nemeses—aren’t exactly dropped, but they’re aren’t exactly tied up in satisfying ways either. A formally daring work such as this hinges on follow-through that reaches a bombastic climax or twist; Fucking With Nobody sadly fizzles. That said, there are some final act scenes that will certainly stick with you.
Fucking With Nobody might not be as cheeky and anarchic as it thinks it is, but it toes some dangerous lines and clearly has a lot of fun doing so. If you see films that explore the “modern condition” as irksome, and if you typically shy away from films that expound dissertation-style arguments, then Fucking With Nobody might not be for you. But if you’re happy getting swept up in a whirlwind of art school semantics, sex, and sociology, then give this a spin.
