by Douglas Messerli
Daniel Hagberg and Mattias Pollak (screenplay), Daniel
Hagberg (director) Naken (Naked) / 2013 [29 minutes]*
Later, Anthony tries to waylay
him at school, again suggesting they talk, but Erik seems not to even imagine a
reason why they would talk, brushing him off, asking him where his girlfriend,
Elin, is. There is clearly now way he’s going to talk about whatever happened
at the party.
Yet, when he sees Anthony with a girl, Isabella (Magdalena Sverlander)
hanging on him, trying to distract him from his gaze, we can perceive that Erik
is troubled. Again, he calls Rebecca for sex.
Meanwhile, Anthony’s co-called
girlfriend, quite obviously dissatisfied given his lack of attention, suggests
that perhaps they can spend more time together before he leaves, the first time
we discover that Anthony is headed off for London to take a course away from
his Swedish University. Since he won’t even talk to her, she is about to head off
out of the relationship until he stops her, hugging her in apology.
Later at a nightclub, a guy in
the toilet (Johan Badh) asks how his previous night was with Anthony, obviously
having observed their early attraction to each other. Erik tries to laugh it
off, to even pretend no knowledge of what the guy at the other urinal is asking:
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
The guy backs off without
further pursuing what he’s observed.
But once more Erik is quite obviously disturbed, telling his friend
Pontus that he’s heading off as he trudges once more home in a gesture of
denial.
This time his call is no longer to Rebecca but to Anthony; but it is
Anthony who in this instance doesn’t answer as he sits on the couch attempting
to make it up to Isabella. The two men seem trapped in their own refusals to
face what they feel for one another.
Anthony is in the bathroom blow drying his hair when a friend calls
telling him to hurry up and bring Isabella to the party. Isabella picks up the
message, but then discovers another message, another voice, Erik’s. “What the
hell do you think you’re doing? You fucking faggot! Do you really think there’s
something between us? [You can hear Erik panting, perhaps even crying.] What
happened means nothing to me. I don’t want to see you ever again.” As she walks
into the bathroom, Isabella realizes that she’s lost Anthony forever.
It is not the party for Anthony we now observe, but one which Erik is
attending, Pontus still trying to hook him up with a girl named Lisa.
Inevitably, Erik goes off to a room with Lisa where they kiss, strip, and
begin to make love. But he can’t stand Lisa’s grasping hand, pulling it away
from his head and neck again and again, before sitting up in utter frustration.
Again, he leaves the party alone.
This time he doesn’t seek solace with Rebecca but goes directly to
Anthony’s apartment, asking for him to let him in. He saunters in like an angry
kid, wandering for a moment up the narrow hall before turning to Anthony to
tell him: “You ruined my life!”
Within seconds they are pushing and pulling at one another, intensely
kissing, stripping off their clothes, and almost leaping into bed. They are
almost violent in their lust. They snuggle up against one another after sex,
Anthony asking him to see him tomorrow before he goes.
Slowly, almost languidly, Erik returns to Rebecca’s apartment, she
surprised to see him, he mostly making small talk. Finally, he declares that
they need to talk, asking her eventually if she’s happy with their
relationship—clearly an on and off affair, with no real commitment of love. He
mutters that he’s been thinking about their relationship, and she asks, point
blank, have you been seeing someone? Again he denies any other relationship. He
claims he just wants to know if they both want the same thing.
She interrupts him to say she wants to keep it simple. While she is out
of the room making coffee, he takes out his cellphone and again listens to
Anthony’s first message about how things turned strange and they need to talk.
It appears that the message itself has become a sort of lifeboard of hope.
This story, of a deep love suddenly making itself apparent to a character
at the very moment he is about to lose it, has long been a trope of
heterosexual films. How many trains and planes have left the station and been
tracked the runway without the lover showing up or with the lover watching in
wan despair off without any possibility of calling him or her back. In Casablanca,
Rick loses Elsa in this manner twice, through train and plane. But at least he
is left with a potential male lover in Louis Renault. In this film, and in such
other queer versions of this trope, such as the film, Last Summer which
I discuss above, there is no one left to replace the lost lover. Love is
discovered too late to claim its reward.
In Naked Anthony is left only with Erik’s message, “You mean a lot
to me.” And his response “I’m going to miss you” is so meaningless and clichéd
that it registers almost as a slap in the face.
What both men truly feel is perhaps so deeply profound that it cannot be
spoken. Like Isabella, Rebecca, who has overheard the message, realizes that
there will probably be no further relationship, however simple, with Erik. Erik
is actually saying goodbye to his gay lover and his heterosexuality both.
Anthony’s later message from English that “everything’s going to be okay,”
sounds almost like rejection of the passion the two previously exuded. They
have both given away the deepest part of themselves.
Hagberg’s Naked is what one might describe as a difficult movie to
watch. But then so are all the films of this genre, which I might almost be
summarized by the two lines of John Denver’s popular song of 1966: “…I'm
leavin' on a jet plane / Don't know when I'll be back again.”
*The
title of this work should not be confused with Jose A. Cortés Amunarriz’ Desnudos
(Naked) of this same year.
Los Angeles, December 15, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).
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