Naked

Naked marks Mike Leigh's leap from small-scale urban satire (High Hopes, Life is Sweet) to film-making of an altogether darken more morally and intellectually challenging (and disturbing) nature.

The subject of both controversy and acclaim ( Mike Leigh - voted Best Director at Cannes 1993, David Thewlis - Best Actor) on its release, Naked follows mouthy Manc Johnny (Thewlis), driven by existential rage and an almost palpable sense of millennial panic on his nightmare odyssey through a blackened Britain.

After raping a woman in Manchester, Johnny flees to London and turns up at Louise (his ex-girlfriend)'s home. After taunting her careerist aspirations he sleeps with and abuses her house-mate, and wanders off in to the London night. Despite Johnny's street encounters and his own lack of any fixed abode, it would be a mistake to view Naked as a filmic plea on the behalf of the homeless; Leigh's treatment of the down and out Scots; Archie and Maggie is consistently unsympathetic. The director's real objective, to evoke a genuine sense of national (and personal) crisis, is far more ambitious. In Johnny, his verbose, miserable and misogynistic bastard of an anti-hero, he has created an entrancing wanderer in his apocalyptic vision of 90s Britain.

The absolute power of Naked to engage our minds and emotions is in no small pad due to the sheer magnetic force of David Thewlis' uttedy mesmerising performance. Wise-cracking Johnny is Leigh's release valve, his jokes are dark and funny, but seem to stem not from any human warmth, but rather from a need to disguise his spiky misanthropy.

Naked's tendency toward misogyny and sexual violence is undeniably distuting. Leigh's directorial ambivalence towards Johnny's actions and his reluctance to publicly clarify what his intentions were when he created such a sexual brute of a character; seemed only to have exacerbated doubts about his integrity. Unresolved, this situation remains one of the film's biggest problems.

Naked is nevertheless, a bleakly brilliant film. Leigh's vision of third-world Britain is haunting enough; Thewlis's Johnny is simply unforgettable.

Review by Iain Harral
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95