I was not struck by the manifold plotlines, underdeveloped characters, or unanswered questions of Richard LeMay’s Naked As We Came. Instead, it was the ludicrous costume design that made the film worth remembering. In almost every scene, one to three characters are clad entirely in grey. The dreary grayscale is giving “fog,” “thrift store in rural Virginia,” and “emotionless color palette.” By the fifth grey scene, I realized that the director was obsessed with charcoal. Was everyone mourning old mother Lilly’s death before it even happened? When the characters sat at a dinner table, all but Lilly were dressed in grey. In fact, I think Ted and Elliot wear identical grey quarter-zips in three distinct scenes. If a one-off occurrence, perhaps this could be overlooked. But by the second dinner scene, I was confused. By the third, I was enraged. Was this an intentional aesthetic choice of the director? Is grey the new marker of turmoil and drama?
Naked As We Came begs to be seen as profound, charting the familiar thematic grounds of infidelity, family reckoning, and uneasy homecomings. But the film is, unfortunately, an example of queer cinema weighed down by one too many competing ideas: a gay love story turned psychological thriller in a rose garden. As we re-watched the film for the seventh time, my friend and I struggled to see beyond the comedy in disguise. Maybe it was the fact that decrepit Lilly, ostensibly too weak to even step out of her wheelchair, somehow walked across the lawn to the greenhouse, where she then passed away.
The film follows siblings Laura and Elliot as they return home to meet their dying mother, Lilly, at her large estate; they were called home by Ted, Lilly’s new groundskeeper and both her and Elliot’s theorized love interest. Naked As We Came brings Hamlet’s grief to the slow-burn romantic intimacy of Call Me By Your Name, leaving me to wonder about the film’s intention.
Right off the bat, Ted seems more a sensitive heartthrob than a gardener hulk. In fact, he even asks Lilly for advice on how to manage the greenery in her yard, a yard that most groundskeepers would see as fairly low-maintenance. Still, Lilly can’t seem to stop fluttering her heavily-painted eyelashes at Ted as she sits at the dinner table; Laura and Elliot, sitting side-by-side, follow Lilly’s gaze. From the outset, a secret seems to float between Lilly and Ted: are they having an affair? Why were Elliot and Laura not informed of this new roommate of hers before arriving at her doorstep? Is Lilly plotting a set-up between Ted and Elliot, and, if yes, is Ted in love with both Lilly and her son? It is later revealed that Ted’s true motivation for entering Lily’s home was to gather material for a novel he is writing on her late husband, a corrupt politician who “randomly” abandoned politics to pursue a laundromat company. Was he laundering money? Did he just have a passion for clean bedding? And, why did Lilly agree to let Ted stalk her for material? Even more, did Lily also know of Ted’s romantic interest in her son… despite Ted also having a long-term boyfriend back home (and a bedside photo of him to prove it)?
There is also a vague backdrop of a political scandal involving the dead dad. That’s it. No, really. That is all we know. There is some involvement in a political scandal. Full stop. If we were never going to explore the dad’s political drama, why was it even brought up? And, if this is Ted’s true motive behind his novel, why isn’t he digging up more information?
While I love to hate on Naked As We Came, I have to admit it was the best movie to watch with my best friend in a dirty classroom in HQ, the both of us trading bags of candy and cans of Diet Coke as we stared blankly at the film projected onto a whiteboard. We, just like the characters in the film, were embodying The Grey Sweater—simply existing in confusion and ambiguity. The film isn’t deep enough to inspire or clever enough to be self-consciously funny. It just exists. Like most of us.