Three miles north of the Swedish town of Molkom lies the New Age resort of Angsbacka, which once a year around summertime allows in members of the interested public to enter into its environs for a festival of self-actualisation. Here we follow a "sharing group" who have been brought together to get in touch with themselves through a series of events and encounters, only one of them, Australian backpacking rugby coach Nick, is not so sure he has got himself into a place where he really wants to be, and laments to the camera about the amount of chanting and hugging that is going on - will he manage to fit in?
He may well do, as here is a documnentary as much about Nick's "journey" as it is about Mervi, the Swedish grandmother who longs to find herself, Siddharta, the self-proclaimed King of his fishing village who we know Nick is rubbing up the wrong way, or Ljus, an ex-goatherder who has embraced the hippy lifestyle after years of not feeling a part of it. Something directors Robert Cannan and Corinna McFarlane made sure to do was make these characters stand out through well-chosen editing, but as all of them apart from Nick are very keen on losing themselves in the whole experience there was a danger of this descending into an uncritical endorsement of the lifestyle.
At first you think this is going to be a "let's laugh at the hippies" send up for nearly two hours, and that does seem to be the way the directors started out, but with Nick they found their hero, a man who took a cynical look at the blissful oblivion his fellow holidaymakers were giving in to and could not allow himself to do likewise. The scene where his group literally venture out into the surrounding forests to indulge in treehugging almost seems like a parody, and to Nick that's what it is, complaining that he cannot get close to his tree because of its spiky branches and reacting with, at best, bemusement when Ljus unselfconciously tells him that he sensed his own tree had a "crotch".
That unselfconsiousness is what the others appreciate, while Nick cannot get it out of his mind that he feels like a berk participating in all of this. But then something happens when one night the firewalking event is staged, and he loves it: finally he is getting his head around this whole New Age thing. Whether you go along with him on this is a matter of personal taste, and for some this point may be the one where they start to lose interest as they simply cannot buy into the whole mood of the set-up that the Aussie is warming to, but luckily for the film's sense of humour, he remains identifiably himself, even if what was the worst week of his life has turned into one of the best.
So much so that he decides to stay on for another week, which the directors must have been counting their blessings over. Not that the others in his group are dull, as they all have their interesting aspects, but we needed that source of contrariness to create a bit of interest in what begins to appear dangerously close to an instructional video. Except an instructional video would not feature what happens to the hapless Mervi when she is told by a tutor to stop him careering towards her with the power of her mind, a shocking moment which provides practically the sole instance of anyone actually questioning whether any of this is good for you, or whether it's a lot of self-indulgent arseing about. Yet by the end, you do think that it's not all bad if the group leaves on friendly terms, and if all that sweat lodge-ing and tantric sex works, good luck to them.
