Fat Front

Fat Front is a wonderfully (body) positive time-lapse documentary about four young women from Denmark, Norway and Sweden who have accepted their bodies (or are on the right path to acceptance) and have decided to use them as their main weapons in fighting against fat shaming and objectification of (female) bodies. Like its main characters, the film does not evaluate or judge anyone and it certainly does not celebrate being overweight. If you feel comfortable with your weight, then it’s okay to be fat (an adjective to which the women in the film want to return its neutral meaning, so that it is not derogatory, but rather descriptive of a characteristic – just as when we say that someone is tall). While it is true that being fat is not healthy, spending a lifetime rejecting oneself and escaping into isolation because you want to avoid judgmental/disgusted looks from others is no better. This mainly involves people not being stigmatised and having to feel bad just because they do not conform to the contemporary, historically varying ideal of beauty (see, for example, the plump bodies in Baroque paintings). Though individual self-acceptance is fine, disdain for fat people, which creates numerous material and mental barriers (for example, the perception of a fat person primarily through the prism of his/her weight rather than character), is based on the social mindset, which takes a long time to change. Thanks to the number of situations depicted, the documentary makes it possible to understand in greater depth the struggles faced by overweight people, to see the world through their eyes and not to view them from the outside as victims deserving compassion. The film offers a history of the Fat Underground movement, childhood sexual harassment (leading to a major disturbance of one’s relationship to his/her own body), regret for wasting many years of one’s life waiting to lose weight and to be able to live a “normal” life, the ambivalent role of social networks, which offer, in addition to verbal bullying, a sense of acceptance by the broader community ... there are a lot of things to unpack, perhaps too many to cover in ninety minutes, but that is understandable in the case of a film that addresses such a multifaceted theme (or rather as one of the first to approach it without the usual clichés), and it’s a great thing that it does. 80% (2020.01.11)