My Nudity Means Nothing (Marina de Van, 2019) (Patreon)

Although Marina de Van has made two feature films in the interim, it feels very much like her latest, My Nudity Means Nothing, is a conceptual follow-up to her 2002 breakthrough In My Skin. That earlier effort was a strange slice of feminist body-horror, in which a woman, played by de Van, suffers a leg injury and then becomes obsessed with the phenomenological status of her own body, going from sadly-typical expressions of dysfunction, such as cutting, and ending up in a state of complete self-dissociation, leading to some minor self-cannibalism and a desire to tan her own hide as if she were a dead animal.

In My Skin was, in part, a response to how young, attractive women are forced to see themselves as objects, so as to comprehend the male attention they solicit. Her latest film is an experimental essay documentary in which de Van, now 48, is reckoning with middle-age, the changes her body has undergone, and the struggles of a woman "of a certain age" as she tries to find a partner through internet dating. 

Although it is wholly different in its tone, there is something about My Nudity that calls to mind the late autobiographical films of Agnès Varda. Like those works, de Van's film takes stock of how her desires and her self-image are triangulated through the social meanings ascribed to her body. At certain points in My Nudity, de Van looks back at some of her earlier work, comparing her younger body to the shape it now takes. While she does not evince dissatisfaction, per se, she makes it clear that she feels that her sexual satisfaction is contingent upon finding men her age who are interesting and attractive to her. 

As we watch her on several dates (and in one sex scene), this is not an easy task. Marina keeps putting herself out there and getting disappointed. She then retreats to her small Parisian apartment, where she feels comfortable lying about naked and cuddling with her beloved cat Nasar. Sometimes de Van seems bored with the men she meets; other times she seems merely insecure. But My Nudity is about a midlife fear of being alone, spiked with the confusion that comes with actually liking the solitude to some degree. Is she happy? She isn't sure.

There is no false advertising in this film. De Van spends a good 75% of its running time in various states of undress. There is a frankness to My Nudity that displays certain affinities with the films of Jean-Claude Brisseau, but where his films are mostly about the hopeless propping-up of the aging male libido, de Van's film is shot through with ennui and ambivalence. She visits with her adult siblings, and we see her interacting with her young niece, or hanging with her unattached, sexually adventurous brother. These are like little test cases for other lives she could be living, but it's never clear, to her or to us, whether these are options she actually wants.

There's a kind of meta-level at work in this film. With de Van's bracing openness about wanting out of her sexual slump, and the near-constant display of her very attractive body, My Nudity Means Nothing can be taken as the most personal, artistically accomplished dating video ever made. We learn all about Marina. She vapes constantly. She is a cat lover. She is an intellectual artist who is always working on something. And her pad is a bit of a mess. But really, the film is document of contemporary female / feminist desire, its negotiations and disappointments, and although it often looks defeatist in its portrait of middle-age femininity, de Van ends on a positive, hopeful note. There has always been something aristocratic and unreachable in de Van's bearing, but My Nudity Means Nothing finds her casting herself quite convincingly as Every Woman, a solo Sex et la Ville.