Bare

While it's fascinating to watch all these good looking men work through the rehearsal process naked, this film captures exactly what rehearsals can be: a tedious time. This is especially true when the choreographer isn't sure what he wants and he's taking almost a year to create his latest work.

This isn't a film for the general public, and theater people (like me) will recognize both its merits and its faults, so be prepared for a lot of slow, dull sequences as it moves toward its climax.

As someone who appreciates the naked male body in its natural, unexaggerated, masculine form, I was pleasantly surprised to find this film. The men were looked perfect in their natural form -- unlike most other such performances which feature feminine looking, shaved (they look like lizards with their shaved bodies), or overly gym-tones unnatural looking bodies -- all of which are typical 'gay' culture's idea of naked men, but distasteful to me.

The acting was good, and the actors put in a lot of hard work, but their moves were not very graceful -- which was a disappointment. Overall, really liked the performance because of the beautiful men.

If you watched this dreary film expecting to see eleven naked men with interesting bodies, you would be deeply disappointed. Yes, there is nudity, but our (my partner's and mine) reaction was: who cares. The majority of the men were scruffy and obviously too lazy to shave. For the most part, they did not have the bodies one would expect for a dancer to have. In point of absolute fact, they looked better with their clothes on, and that's not saying much.

And as for the dancing, forget it. The best you could call it was performance art, and that's using the term loosely.

Screened at Doc Edge Festival

Dance documentary Bare follows a choreographer and his team going through a process of auditions, rehearsals and eventually a premiere. The journey reveals internal artistic conflicts between the dancers and their personal challenges during the several months of creating the performance.

Closeups of male skin and non-stop graphic nudity show how vulnerable these men can be within the non-existent borders of artistic freedom. More of a celebration of the male body than erotica, Belgian choreographer and director of Anima Ardens, Thierry Smits, isn't always clear about the way things are going but trusts his dancers with the vision he's trying to accomplish. Anima Ardens demands the dancers to let go of their inhibitions and confront themselves with their instincts. Reminiscent of a modern art installation at times, different stages throughout the production get cut by flashes of the final performance and pieces of Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights".

A very simple and at times strangely voyeuristic behind-the-scenes look into this dance company, can make some uncomfortable, but it's the unity and playfulness of this group of naked men that pulls you back to reality to remind you these are just humans with nothing to hide. Phalluses galore, there's nothing holding them back to "get rid of their beauty and act more like a beast", like Smits commands them at one point, when it seems like they're not giving it their all. Luckily these gentlemen don't take any of it personally and when an unattended camera records the men bantering in the locker rooms by slapping their flaccid penises from left to right against their legs, it's clear the age old phrase "boys will be boys" is still alive and kicking.

These dancers all have perfectly sculpted bodies, but the lack of diversity in showcasing a wider range of body types just seems like a wasted opportunity. Surely Smits didn't intend to end up with exactly this group of dancers, since early on we get to witness some sort of survival of the fittest where even he finds it hard to make the right choices, solely based on their technique and form.

Director/cinematographer/editor and producer Aleksandr M. Vinogradov, knows exactly what he's doing following this group of talented guys for 11 months of rehearsal, but at one point misses the ball by inserting an unnecessary slow motion shower sequence that doesn't entirely fit with the rest of the film and brings down the quality just a notch of what otherwise does feel entirely authentic, and at times even hypnotising. The original score by Aleksandr Vasilenko goes full Under The Skin, which seems fitting with the subject matter, and literally crawls under your skin.

Bare embraces homosocial bonding with a hint of playfulness, while once again challenging art to explore another level of humanity and a very peculiar kind of theatricality.

I was mistaken in the purpose of this film. I expected a registration of a probably fascinating and maybe even controversial ballet performace, concerning eleven naked men, with as a preliminary extra a documentary of the auditioning and rehearsals. But the movie dead-ended after showing the rehearsals, so we never get to see what the whole actual performance looked like. What we do get to see of the rehearsals, is these naked men endlessly crawling over each other, standing about like statues or frantically jumping around. I couldn't discern any point or narrative in all this naked turmoil (assuming that the ballet was supposed to have any).

If you expect (as I naively did) some kind of tribute to the beauty of the male body, by the use of (as I had hoped for) exquisite and sensuous dance movements, you are sadly disappointed. Apart from the visuals during the opening credits, the cinematography is totally uninspiring, the music is (at least in this documentary, I don't know about the actual performance) bleak and annoying, and the whole thing is anything but sensuous. A waste of time!