The film features two fifteen-year-old girls, Fama and Naomi. They come across each other in the subway, at a swimming pool, and in a sauna. They pass each other on the street exchanging glances. They start a fascinating flirtation, a spectacle of seduction and rejection, a relentless struggle for power. The white girl from the upper-middle class and the dark-skinned daughter of immigrants grow close to each other, just to jump back to a safe distance every now and then. They study each other and alternately take the initiative.
Antoniak shows their amorous chase as a sensual game. Piotr Sobociński Jr’s camera masterfully reveals the protagonists’ bodies and shows them as the objects of desire. Sobociński watches them with a sensuous eye, focusing the camera on small gestures, and studying the texture of their skin in slow motion which assigns meaning to the shots. The cinematography is one of the strongest elements of Antoniak’s film, which is even more important for the Polish director completely gives up on dialogue and puts her trust solely in the power of images.
Nude Area is a story about eroticism, not sexuality. Antoniak tells the story of a game with the sublimation of desire rather than fulfilment at stake. It is played out in glances, small gestures and furtive dabs. It is also a story about a passion that cannot be satisfied, given that the real source of pleasure is the very seeking of fulfilment rather than the fulfilment itself.
One of the director’s inspirations while working on the film was The Seducer’s Diary by Søren Kierkegaard, a small booklet in which the Danish philosopher meticulously described the process of seducing a teenage Cordelia (in reality – his beloved Regina Olsen). In the following pages a common journal evolves into erotic thriller and a study on love.
Antoniak’s film echoes the philosopher’s book. The game between seducer and seduced has no clear rules, and its subject is power over another person. Starting from the position of a hunting seductress, Fama gradually becomes the prey, and a helpless object of desire, which initially seemed to be Naomi, gains power over the girl who desires her. Antoniak observes this erotic battle with fascination. Her film is a theatre of seduction – everybody plays the role assigned to him by culture. There is no promise of fulfilment, only walking on thin ice and constant uncertainty.
Antoniak's film is also a story about a meeting of cultures, their mutual attraction and repulsion. Fama is a Dutch girl from a family of intelligentsia, and Naomi – the daughter of Arab immigrants living in the suburbs. One comes from rich secular Europe, the other – from the Muslim community, which is governed by dozens of prohibitions and taboos sanctioned by religion. The mutual fascination between the girls becomes a symbol of the relationship between the European and Arab culture.
Not for a moment does this story fall into journalism. Nude Area is primarily an account of the impossibility of individual fulfilment, to which culture is just one of many obstacles. Awareness of inevitable failure as well as loneliness are inscribed in the ritual of seduction. It is not by chance that Antoniak’s protagonists live in a world in which other people merely form the background, insignificant pieces of scenography. Love and passion isolate them from the world and build an invisible wall.
Antoniak opens her film with a quote from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, an extraordinary essay on utterances of love. Subsequent parts of the film are announced by the titles of chapters of the book by French thinker and are to illustrate the following ‘figures’ of love discourse described here by means of rhythmically appearing images.
Nude Area does not have a classic three-act composition. In terms of structure the film essay resembles a musical fugue, in which two voices (Fama and Naomi) create a polyphonic narrative. The same images return constantly like a chorus –we see a fan at the exhaust of ventilation, white block of flats, a lovers’ park reminiscent of Impressionist paintings, a naked body washed with water ... In Antoniak’s film they do not gain symbolic weight – the director avoids imposing additional meanings to images. Their aim is to set the story in a rhythm and to build a narrative structure.
Nude Area is a challenging film: boldly narrated, masterfully shot, full of understatements. It is a story about passion and eroticism, a study of seduction devoid of dialogue, nonetheless hypnotic and very blunt.
- Nude Area, written and directed by Urszula Antoniak, cinematography by Piotr Sobociński Jr, edited by Milenia Fiedler, music by Paweł Mykietyn.
Author: Bartosz Staszczyszyn 27.05.2015, transl. GS, June 2015