This Thursday, Amazon Prime releases “Nudes,” a drama series that focuses on online bad behavior associated with nudes. We tell you what we thought of the new French series from the American streaming platform.
What is it about ?
A true television anthology, Nudes invites us to discover three distinct stories, those of Victor, Ada and Sofia, three young people at different ages from adolescence, who do not know each other and do not have much in common .
All three are, however, familiar with nudes, that is to say naked photos of themselves sent to a trusted person, usually a romantic or sexual partner. Unfortunately, these nudes are not always taken or shared with the consent of the person concerned.
This is how Victor found himself, one day, accused of having distributed pornographic images of a minor, in this case a video of a sexual relationship that a young woman had during a student party at which both participated.
Conversely, Sofia discovers, the day after an evening, that a video of her is circulating on social networks, a video taken without her knowledge during it and in which we see her having sexual intercourse with a another young woman.
As for Ada, it’s a descent into hell the day she is told that after registering on a dating application and having exchanged with an older student at her school, the nudes that he had asked her were posted on pornographic sites.
Who is it with?
One of the particularities of Nude lies in the fact that the stories of Victor, Ada and Sofia are told by three different directors. We thus find, behind the camera, Andréa Bescond (Les chatouilles, When you’re big), Lucie Borleteau (Sweet song, To my only desire) and Sylvie Verheyde (Stella, Madame Claude).
In front of the camera, three performers almost unknown to the general public were chosen to embody the young main characters, namely Léonie Dahan-Lamort (Un si grand soleil, Stella est amour), Nelligan (with whom he first role on screen) and Baptiste Masseline (Mixed).
Also note the presence, in secondary roles, of the rapper Gringe (Comment c’est loin, Blockés), the comedian Waly Dia (Commissariat central, Osmosis, Vise le coeur), and the actor Jérémy Gillet (Mytho, Very Ordinary People).
It’s worth checking out ?
Nude was among our expectations for 2024. Now online, it confirms our intuition: it is THE French series at the start of the year.
Indeed, we praised you, at the beginning of January, for his risky desire to take on a completely contemporary subject such as nudes, still rarely treated in fiction, or at least in a central way as here. Finally, it is very interesting to note that the series does not talk so much about nudes than human relationships, by avoiding the pitfall of taking an uninformed and moralizing view of this practice and by showing that the abuses (cyber-harassment, revenge porn…) come, above all, as with any new technology or practices popular with young people, from what each person does with it.
Nude furthermore, demonstrates a certain subtlety in his pedagogy. Child of a farmer, from the suburbs or from a bourgeois background, child from a single-parent family or not, boys and girls accused or accomplices… To show that no young person is safe drifts associated with nudes and it is, as such, important to be aware of these, the series has the intelligence to introduce characters who do not have much in common. The series is also helped by the good choice of format, that of the anthology, which allows several stories to be told over a few episodes rather than just one over more episodes.
Claude Pocobene
The quality of Nude comes, on the other hand, from the strong stories that she tells, embodied, what is more, by a solid casting, and in particular by three talented and talented young performers, namely Léonie Dahan-Lamort, Nelligan and Baptiste Masseline. Striking is, for example, the scene where Ada, a 14-year-old girl, receives a request for nude from a young man approaching the age of majority while she is in pajamas with a cat face pattern brushing her teeth with her children’s light-up brush. Chilling is also the scene where Victor and his best friend chat in the jacuzzi during the student party which raises questions.
If a whole bunch of themes are not, in Nudementioned only in a succinct and secondary manner (sex education and consent, homophobia, class contempt, child crime, relationship of trust in the police and justice, feminist reappropriation of public space), let us salute, despite everything, this highlighting which reminds us that all these cases of sexual violence are never just that but are, in reality, crossed and motivated by multiple influences on a personal or societal scale which must therefore be taken into account .
Nude is a new mini-series to discover online from this Thursday, February 1 on Amazon Prime Video.