I got this off a French website and ran it through Google Translate, then I kicked the translation around to get it into better English, except for one sentence which I just can't quite understand. It's worth a quick look at the original though, because there are pictures.
http://tetu.com/nu-nouvelle-serie-francaise-met-monde-a-poil-video-ocs-capaCULTURE
"Nu" ("Naked"), the new French series where everyone is naked.
CAPA has already produced the Braquo or Versailles series, but a completely different costume budget has been allocated to Nu, coming on OCS. A police series, certainly, but also comic and political. And especially a series about futurism (or horror depending on your degree of modesty) that imagines a post-terrorist world in which everyone is obliged to be naked. Its creator, Olivier Fox, a veteran director of "classic" crime series, proposed the project to CAPA, then OCS, a year ago. The filming was completed in October 2017. He told TETU where he got such a plan:
"I had an idea during the period of terrorist attacks in France and our attempts to achieve a feeling of "total security", and I told myself that the only way to check what people were carrying would be that everyone is naked!"
So he imagined the story of a cop who falls into a coma then wakes up in 2026 and discovers that in order to fight against the feeling of insecurity, European governments (with the exception of the English, as Brexit let them avoid it) took a drastic step: the Naked Law. It forces citizens to be naked in public, to ensure complete transparency: no more hidden weapons, explosives, secrets, no more social barriers. For the past 4 years, everyone has been lighter in theory under the banner of "Freedom, Equality, Nudity ...". A paranoid imposition that paradoxically makes people very happy.
Franck, the cop transported in time, will resume service and have to conduct - naked - an investigation around the death of one of the designers of this law of transparency, found dressed in the forest. Franck will then discover that behind the diktat of openness, many lies still hide. We are in a classic crime series, but naked and funny.
One immediately thinks of Ryad Satouf's cinematographic dystopia, Jacky in the Realm of Girls, in which men were subject to the matriarchal power of a society opposite to ours. A reversal of codes so anchored inside us that we can hardly imagine it.
"It will be more like a good big episode of the English series "Black Mirror", in 10 episodes of 26 minutes, says Olivier Fox, libertarian inspired as in the movies of the Larrieu brothers , or even Guiraudie's "Stranger by the Lake" or the film "More" by Schroeder ... "
Naked, yes, all the time, but not about sex (unlike the "Porn" series where sex is the subject, for example)! The goal was to "totally desexualize nudity, the law forbids erections in public for example, like judgments on bodies ... Planning this, I did not want to bring eroticization of the body. No voyeurism. We are like a naturist camp, but not libertine like in Cap D'Agde."
This is what seduced and certainly didn't discourage Satya Dusaugey, the main character (the cop):
"Yes it's naked, unambiguous, but the goal is not to show genitals, that wouldn't last 5 minutes. There is a real scenario, a real story. The director takes this nudity for granted, we hide nothing with flowerpots, but he made tight shots, wide shots, as in a normal movie, with the same techniques as for any film!"
Are some scenes more difficult to shoot?
"Once you get started, you don't think about it. Of course, when you see your colleagues coming, you have two minutes and then you get to work. In the end, I didn't think I was showing myself naked all the time, I found myself beautifully dressed. Genitals in themselves, outside the context, are not very pretty, neither man nor woman. It loses its mystery when it's out in the open."
No false body parts, therefore, in silicones; all bodies will be true in Nu. But behind this, lies, unspoken words: "It's a delirium we all have had, very motivating, to play a hermetic character to this universe and that will end up there, criticizing the society where we seek all the truth, discover that behind the nakedness there is always a lot of corruption " [That last sentence is exactly what Google Translate came up with.]
Making nudity normal is the subject at the center of the film but not the story. It is above all a reflection on exposing oneself, telling the truth, about the power and the meaning one gives to the body and to our liberties. And for Satya Dusaugey, an analysis of our present:
"We are supposedly free with certain laws but we can say much less than before ... sometimes rightly, sometimes accusations fall on you. Do we face a certain loss of freedom? With social networks, information channels, we are in search of controversy, not reflection."
A series much less light than it seems, then ....
"Nu", directed and written by Olivier Fox, co-written with Olivier Duplat and Judith Godinot. Produced by Arnaud Figaret / CAPA Drama. Currently in post-production. Spring 2018 broadcast on OCS.
