Going behind the scenes of Thierry Smits’ all-male, all-nude modern dance piece Anima Ardens, this film is duller and less focused than it could have been
While the sight of naked flesh has always been a sensitive area in cinema history, male frontal nudity elicits especially visceral responses. In a still male-dominated industry, it is woefully normal for female bodies to be seen as mere objects of desire. In contrast, a penis on screen still triggers shock, discomfort and even a vulnerability that some viewers, along with censors, find hard to confront. Through chronicling the months-long rehearsals of a modern dance piece called Anima Ardens, for which every male dancer performs in the nude, Aleksandr M Vinogradov’s documentary aims to remove the taboos attached to the male form.
Bare could have been radical, or at least intriguing, but it really is dull. This is partly due to the abstract nature of dance director Thierry Smits’ work. With an elusive ideal of masculinity in mind, he asks the dancers to perform like beasts and emphasises unsophisticated movements. At times, the troupe clearly feel frustrated, as if the piece exists in chunks rather than an emotional whole. The film’s structure is similarly unfocused. Beautiful shots of the dancers’ naked bodies contorting into abstract shapes are punctuated with millisecond-long inserts of words such as “MASCULINITY”, “WEAKNESS” and “666”, flashing on a blank screen, and snippets of classical paintings that depict male nudity. Such hollow flourishes undermine the arresting physicality of the dancers’ movements.