Gymnophobes beware. As is to be expected with a film about a naturist resort, there’s a lot of dangling, wobbling, and hair everywhere. If anything, directors Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas frontload Naked Gardens with several scenes of full-on nudity to make it clear: there’s no shame here.
Nudist colonies were a mainstay of c-grade cinema for decades, a successor to the old pregnancy scare and syphilis shockers as a way to sneak a little bit of T&A on to the silver screen. But the Austin duo’s journey into the community at Florida’s Sunsport Gardens Family Nudist Resort is not about lurid, lascivious voyeurism (as one resident notes, there aren’t any pretty people naked). Instead, as with all their work, it’s about a community. It’s just that this one happens to be skyclad much of the time. Increasingly nudity is expected but not actually required, as the sign says. The textiles, as they are dubbed, are slowly growing in number, and the community faces an existential threat. Meanwhile, there’s a degree of friction between the nudists (who just prefer or enjoy to be naked) and the naturists, who come it their unclothed status from a broader, more philosophical viewpoint.
Even though Naked Gardens continues Bresnan and Lucas’s technique of filming their subjects at a certain distance, there’s none of the social anthropologist’s reserve that was present in earlier works like Pahokee. Their debut feature was also a portrait of a whole community: in Pahokee‘s case, the graduating high school seniors of another, primarily Black city in the Everglades, and it also worked with a large cast who would drift in and out of the narrative. Naked Gardens feels more immersive, more intimate, and that’s potentially a side effect of the filmmakers having to go au naturel themselves, so as to not stand out. In the ongoing discussion about textiles, they implicitly took a side, breaking that sense of distant observer that has sometimes given their films a dispassionate air of cerebral interest.
With Naked Gardens, there is instead a warmth, and not simply that of the glow of the Florida sun on flesh, from translucent childhood to wrinkled age. It’s most obviously expressed in the childish glee and steely optimism of Morley, the aging head of the business-cum-community, who is at ease in all circumstances. There’s a subtle sense that he’s why this gentle community can survive, even as he ensures the other long-term residents that it can indeed keep going without, or rather after, him. But mostly he seems interested in dealing with the present, the day-to-day, and especially the upcoming Christmas festivities.
It’s not the nudity, per se, that makes Naked Gardens interesting, either visually, narratively, or philosophically. It’s simply that it’s what defines the outer borders of this community, within which Bresnan and Lucas find personalities rather than drama. There may be rumblings about textiles, but then everyone’s happy to share in young Serenity’s birthday, even if mom DeeDee only moved them there because it’s one of the few remaining affordable places to hitch up a trailer. Indeed, drama is what’s furthest from the residents’ minds, as expressed by Jeremy, a jovial and barrel-chested mountain of a man who, with his wife and child, has fled the judgmental eyes of his home town (as his wife, Makayla, puts it, the asshole of the Bible Belt).
The charm of Naked Gardens is that there is nothing more here than a depiction of a place in which people are happy at their barest. Too often, documentaries confuse tension with raw emotion but here, among moments of sadness, joy, and even strife, Bresnan and Lucas capture that rarest of moods: contentment.
Make sure to read more about the film with our interview with Bresnan and Lucas, “Austin Filmmakers Take Nudist Documentary Naked Gardens to Tribeca,” June 10.
This article appears in June 17 • 2022.
