“People were created to be loved, and things were created to be used. The world is in chaos because everything is the other way around” — this observation of the Dalai Lama could well be the epigraph to the film “100 Things and Nothing Else” — a moralizing and charming German comedy about the consumer society, after watching which you will most likely want to shake up the closet.
How many things do you think you have? Everyone: clothing and footwear, dishes and appliances, books and CDs, stationery and toys, exercise equipment and gadgets, cleaning products and houseplants. Try to at least guess — 500? 1000? Or maybe all 5000?
Paul’s great-grandfathers had 57 items. Grandparents have 200. Parents have 650. Paul himself has 10. Too many for life. Too little to fill a hole in the soul.
Where does it come from, this hole, in a successful German under forty, living in the most prosperous time? How to patch it — and is it possible? How did he, and many of us, come to such a life: at the sight of a discount, we lose our will and reach for a credit card, we force things at home that we hardly use, we spend more time with a smartphone than with loved ones?
Paul and his friend Tony are forced to look for answers to these questions by making an extravagant bet: they will completely give up everything they own, put everything in the warehouse and, starting from absolute zero, will take only one thing every day, gradually refilling the apartment what they really need. And so for a hundred days. I really want to refuse a stupid dispute, but I can’t: several million euros are at stake.
Sometimes the best thing we can do is open our fingers. To get something really important, you have to learn to let go.
“100 things and nothing more” seems to be full of typical comedic twists: yesterday’s sybarites race naked through snowy Berlin to take the first thing from the warehouse, try to bribe subordinates to win the argument, revere the super-successful young entrepreneur (evil caricature of Zuckerberg) , ready to buy the application developed by them — but something more important gradually emerges through this background.
Yes, this film is about the modern consumer society, about the painful dependence on things that can destroy our lives (often literally), and even about how corporations collect data about users in order to be more effective by them — by us! — to rule. But it is also about how we ourselves throw firewood on the fire of children’s insults — on parents, brothers and sisters — and let it burn that very hole in our soul. About the fact that we are obsessed with the very idea of happiness, but “happiness is like water: if you try to hold on, you go through your whole life with clenched fists.”
So sometimes the best thing we can do is open our fingers. To get something really important, you have to learn to let go.