Free the Nipple

Courtesy of IFC Films, WTFilms, Disruptive Films, Emotion Pictures, and Bethsabee Mucho

Thinking that this film was a documentary I was very excited to see it. How could I not be with the social media flurry around the likes of Rumer Willis' campaign to go topless around New York City, Miley Cyrus' support of the film thanks to her association with Esco, and countless other pro-feminist celebrities’ endorsements? To my total disappointment this is not a documentary, and instead a dramatization of the movement's inception. Yeah, I felt the exact same way you must feel right now.

 In Esco's defense the cause she is advocating for is worth the buzz surrounding this film. Women should have just as much freedom to go topless as men, whose bare nipples can be exposed in all 50 states, without prosecution. Instagram and Facebook have completely unfair censorship policies against the bare female nipple, even though similar sexual images of women, and identical ones of men, are completely fine. Unfortunately, all of this was not well expressed in this disjointed, ridiculous little indie film.

 Though the Free the Nipple campaign is barely two years old, the film treats this story like an epic saga, a story about a group of women who fight the patriarchy and eventually takedown unfair laws and online policies. Their fight, however, is still going on, and hasn't changed much in this country, though they have brought awareness to the problem. This juvenile dramatization would make better for a TV movie than the indie market. The characters are flat, there is actual censorship of breasts in several scenes, and then none in others, there's a lot of filler, and the ending is anticlimactic, because with characters like these, whose going to care about the ending to begin with.

 I stress that even if this film had a bigger budget, better characters, and a less haphazard way of relaying information, this film would still not work. It's not a documentary, and for that simple reason this is a waste of everyone’s time. Films like these give fuel to people who dismiss and devalue the fight for equality. Not to say that this film is embarrassing, just that it's unneeded and misses the point. Hopefully a serious documentary film will flower from this one's seedling.