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Desnudos review
:. Director: Gómez Vadillo
:. Starring: Rafael Amaya, Angélica Aragón
:. Running Time: 1:40
:. Year: 2004
:. Country: Mexico
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At the premiere of Desnudos, at the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival, the producer of the film got the bad idea to introduce the beautiful cast before hand to mention the soap opera background of some of the staff and crew; a very unfortunate move that would set the tone for the screening that would follow as, while the movie was unfolding before my eyes, I couldn't help having the uncomfortable feeling to be stuck into daytime reality, a weird parallel universe filled with wooden acting—and I'm not only talking about the nude scenes—and cheesy melodrama.
The film centers around 2 unhappy couples: an innocent artist and his unfaithful sexpot girlfriend and a naïve sweet girl with an abusive conman of a boyfriend. After much drama and deceiving, the two bruised and pure souls will—guess what—find happiness together.
As the title of the film indicates with subtlety, Desnudos is fueled by nudity—both male and female—and sex. The director's desire to approach nudity as a natural facet of acting is obvious onscreen, and he certainly succeeds at this level thanks to the cast's glorious lack of inhibition. But the main issue here is that he tried to build his film around nudity and having a background in daytime TV didn't exactly help as to creating a complex cinematic piece. Nudity here is always gratuitous, arguably aiming at provoking the audience, but it results more often in unintentional laughs than in arousing. The filmmaker should probably have spent more time studying closely French cinema than looking for inspiration in soaps. While French films are always heavy in sex and nudity, these scenes are not only the realistic reflection of a way of life, but more importantly key points of the narrative, which generally set some twisted mechanism in action—just compare Desnudos to Bertollucci's recent Dreamers and you will see how the treatment of nudity differs: In the Dreamers, characters wander nude around the apartment because they are involved in a bizarre game of sexual exploration and manipulation. In Desnudos, they walk around nude, without any reason, would it be to go get milk in the fridge or read the paper on the couch.
Hint, performances here should rather be measured on a scale of courage than talent, but more embarrassing are the soapy-like writing and direction—and don't start to call me a French elitist as usual: the paying spectators next to me were also laughing during some of the "melodramatic" moments.
Another hit and miss is the use of a surreal setting as to interconnect different lives. The filmmaker found an interesting way to develop in parallel the paths of these two couples. But the use of such a narrative device is simply wasted here as your high expectations deflate like a balloon when you realize how banal was the subject of his metaphor—it's like expecting for David Lynch to take the reins of the movie but ending up instead in a Claude Lelouch picture.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
Movie Reviews since 2012
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