Films about falling in love have been done so often that the way the characters in them declare their love has become incredibly important. How does “I love you. You complete me” compare to “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches…” or “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”? Top marks for spotting Jerry Maguire, The Princess Bride and Notting Hill.
Love stories depend for success on a lot of things – but emotional plausibility and the romantic stars aligning need good writing and chemistry to take things over the line.
So how about doing a film about love that’s entirely word free? No speech at all. No hesitant hellos or choked declarations, just two people, one asking the other to love her with a look, a tilt of the head, a sad eye.
Nude Area is that film, Urszula Antoniak’s bold experiment tracking a relationship from infatuation to exhaustion, the only wrinkle being that maybe this relationship didn’t happen at all. It might all be a figment in the shared imagination of two young women, schoolgirls from different sides of the tracks. Naomi is a young fair-skinned woman who lives in a nice house full of books in Amsterdam. Fama is a dark-skinned Muslim, complete with head covering, whose family home is an apartment in a mean part of town.
Like I say, no one speaks. There is sound, way back in the mix, which, like the gauzy visuals of DP Piotr Siobocinski and the edgily ambient music by Ethan Rose swirl together to suggest a heightened state of being, where the rest of the world recedes and the object of affection is hammeringly to the fore.
The two women both attend the same pool/sports complex which allows for many a giddily kaleidoscopic tangle of undressed women showering, or glowing in steam rooms, as Naomi tries to cop a look at Fama, hoping that Fama might be trying to cop a look at her.
There is erotic (not to be confused with pornographic) tension here, with Antoniak’s camera capturing the gorgeousness of young skin (so much water running off in rivulets), and folds of flesh crying out, the camera suggests in recurrent close-ups, to be caressed, in the same way that the lips, hair and face of both Fama and Naomi cry out to be touched.
Repeatedly Antoniak takes us to a moment of consummation, only to reveal that it was all a fantasy in Naomi’s head. Or was it? It’s really quite hard to get a handle on what’s actually happening and what Naomi is fantasising. That is all part of falling in love though, isn’t it?
The actors are remarkable, and all the more remarkable for not having done anything else before or since this came out in 2014. Fama is played by Imaan Hammam, a model (supermodel?) whose face you’ll have seen looking very grown up on billboards, or on the cover of Vogue (she’s done all the Big Four – US, UK, France, Italy). She looks very girlish here, aged 18, and vulnerable, though occasionally, in spite of herself, she almost lapses into a catwalk strut. For the most part, though, this is a lovely “the girl can’t help it” performance.
No one is going to look good against Hammam but Sammy Boonstra is strikingly photogenic all the same and hits all the right notes as Naomi, the instigator (if something this tremulous can be instigated) of the affair, real or imagined. The film is seen through Naomi’s eyes, a girl lost in the wreckage of her own hot-breathed desire, and what superb eyes Boonstra has for that.
For all its bold conceptual approach, Nude Area didn’t convince me half as much as the other four Antoniak films I’ve seen. Like those, this is a short film, at around 80 minutes long. Unlike the others, this felt longer than its running time. The gimmick could not ultimately support the weight. In the end, call me old fashioned, I wanted Fama and Naomi to speak.
Nude Area – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
