Movies You Might Have Missed: Naked

NAKED (1993) - DIR. MIKE LEIGH

I watched English filmmaker Mike Leigh's "Naked" last night with my fiance, and we were both struck with how well this beautiful and haunting film holds up fifteen years later. It leaves a surprisingly exhilarating aftertaste of youthful rebellion. So much can be said about this dark, nihilistic movie that is truly unlike any other Mike Leigh film, even his similarly angry Meantime [1984], Leigh's skinhead movie featuring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.

The film proved controversial upon its release, and Mike Leigh faced charges that he was a misogynist and that he made the audience sympathize with a main character who is a rapist. Now, the question of whether or not Johnny is a rapist is just one of many that Naked will have you asking. Mike Leigh, in an interview on the Criterion DVD special features, maintains that Johnny is not a rapist, but a frustrated victim of his own idealism. Naked is a brilliant, funny and excoriating examination of urban loneliness and despair at materialist culture in contemporary London.



David Thewlis, as the constantly wandering Johnny, is remarkable. He won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993 for this film. His performance blows through about a million emotions, sometimes in the space of one scene. Johnny's philosophical rants, along with all the rest of the actors' dialogue and story, were the result of improvisation honed through almost 12 weeks of rehearsal. I doubt there are many actors who could have handled this tightrope of a character with quite the same precision and aplomb that Thewlis did:



Mike Leigh mentions in the interview that he feels that the films that he's written conventionally aren't as good as the films that he's made as a result of working together with the actors to create the characters. He says that it makes the work richer, and I have to agree. This is clear in this well-known scene where Johnny and a building security guard trade esoteric theories about the apocalypse, the prospect of the future and God:



Lastly, this film is blessed with graceful cinematography and a fascinating score by composer Andrew Dickson. They aid in relieving the audience of what could have been an oppressive heaviness in tone, and lifting the film into the realm of the spiritual:

(NSFW - Naked is a foul language fest!)





Naked is just awesome. See it as soon as possible.