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Nude Area
R1 - America - Omnibus Entertainment / Film Movement Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (16th June 2019). |
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The Film
 Naomi (Sammy Boonstra) is an attractive young woman from a well-to-do Dutch family, living in the post part of Amsterdam. Fama (Imaan Hammam) is an immigrant living in the slums and working in a restaurant. Both feel disconnected from the world around them: Naomi spends her free time in the darkness of her family home, while Fama barricades herself in her bedroom for privacy. Naomi first notices Fama in an all-female sauna. She surreptitiously follows her... or does she? She is upset when Fama, in the company of her friends all wearing traditional hijabs, flirts with a boy. Naomi as Fama's customer at the restaurant drops a fork for her to retrieve and then pushes the soup dish off the table after it and watches her clean it up. They make no contact with one another in the sauna, and yet they seem to inhabit each other's private spaces elsewhere, or do they? Are they two young women exploring a relationship shunned in one society and forbidden in another, or do the images they project of one another - Fama seems as exotic to Naomi as she functions in the restaurant as greeter - allow them to explore their own identities if only in their imaginations? A series of vignettes partially inspired by the text of Roland Barthes' "The Lover's Discourse," Nude Area stimulates the imagination without a word of dialogue, its nudity used less to titillate than to show the ways in which bare flesh can still be an armor against a different kind of vulnerability.
Video
Omnibus have given this film an incredibly low bitrate. It looks okay for the most part given the clean HD video imagery but darker scenes exhibit some faint noise that might have been present in the original photography.
Audio
There is no dialogue on the Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track but English closed captions are included for sound effects and songs.
Extras
There are no extras apart from start-up trailers. 
Overall
A series of vignettes partially inspired by the text of Roland Barthes' "The Lover's Discourse" Nude Area stimulates the imagination without a word of dialogue, its nudity used less to titillate than to show the ways in which bare flesh can still be an armor against a different kind of vulnerability. 
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