Naked (1993)

David Thewlis shines in a bleak performance that never steps wrong, as a highly intelligent low-life roaming around the underbelly of London in this brutal but honest film about people who lack the will to function in their lives while all their knowledge and insight in the world becomes a heavy burden to them.I know I might've missed some of its subtler themes in a post-Thatcher Britain, but I do comprehend its more transparent messages. It's a hard film to watch, but I would love to see it again just to hear Thewlis' marvelous bitter rants and Ewen Bremner yelling "Maggie!".

Films, at least films that are not just a pair of comfortable slippers for the night, which some nights are just what you need, but walking boots for going places, should be next to all the other things about a certain tension and attentiveness in the viewing, demanding something, otherwise we've gone on vacation but didn't leave the hotel.So I'm glad this was recommended to me, it has that tension, provided we're willing to go places. A bitter, seething young man flees Manchester after what looks like rape and crashes in London, to taunt, annoy, and try to enlighten a bunch of ordinary people he comes across. Thewlis gives us a layered self, first raging but later mellowed, crazy and secretly sane. London looks drab and lived. The camera is good enough.But what makes this film worthy is wondering a bit about how you accept this man in your life as a viewer for these two hours. Isn't the film about similar 'viewers' who have to puzzle about this?He's not easy to be around, deliberately so. He's meant to annoy us as much as the characters, we're meant to see that he has a problematic attitude regarding women, that for all his black-clad, sophisticated attraction he is a cranky and petulant kook, and yet we're as surprised as they are to find that he's not a complete jackass. That's the whole reason, it seems, of having the otherwise useless 'landlord' character in the thing, so that we can entertain the comparison with someone who's truly cruel.So write him off or listen? I think neither.I think this is pretty fascinating stuff if you can adopt a middle position. If you can see through his raging bs and halfmad rants about the apocalypse, barcodes and evilness of god, that he's neither above these people, better and wiser than them as he fancies himself, that they're not merely unthinking sheeple but people trying to carve decent, meaningful lives for themselves as best as they know.Nor, on the other hand, is he as useless as some of the comments make him to be. Yes he annoys, but his confrontational manner is the filmmaker's way of jolting bored and desperate viewers. Notice how he constantly repeats questions, throwing the light back, trying to pry truth from small talk. There's nothing to be known about him, as if he embodies a desire we all have to upturn routine. Notice too how he often hovers ghostlike next to people, most clear in the nightwatchman sequence that ends with him having sex the other secretly fantasized about.So this is what's beautiful about the film for me. If you simply admire John as rebellious and clever, or if you write him off as merely selfish and annoying, in both cases you collapse a more ambiguous, more generous view of things.Namely, that he's as far from the truth, as sad and misguided as every other character, and yet that truth, the ground of a meaningful life, is born on a questioning, curious and participatory attitude not unlike his.I'm not sure if Leigh knows this, but there's a rich history of Buddhist masters who taught with a confrontational, sometimes rude approach. A well known example '- What is buddha? Yun-men said: Dried sh-t stick.' The point seems to be: truly look, truly confront your self.There's no problem of evil in Buddhism, evil is a Western obsession. It arises equally from John's overthinking ego as from the dumb unthinking of the Scot boy and the mute despair of the woman in the window, in every case being the 'dukkha' or unsatisfactoriness that Buddhists speak about.Look in the film. Is he more mellow after the beating? As if these few nights of feverish wandering were a way of inviting the (just) beating he escaped from in Manchester. Nor is he truly changed after it, still the same smartass.

In a drab, glacial, shabby London, Mike Leigh offers a disjointed succession of encounters you can't seem to grasp the essence of and that nothing, or almost nothing can be drawn from.As the main character, you wonder in a mass of raw ideas that for some are incredibly under-exploited, like Johnny's past and his physical and mental condition, and that for others are rather unrealistic, like the feminine behaviour in general.Paradoxically, the movie is very talkative in philosophical theories and other mystical tirades, and meaningless. Not to mention that with a duration of a little more than two hours, one can't say this movie is very digestible.What was the goal of the movie ? Which themes the director wanted to address ? What was the message he wanted to convey ? So many questions left unanswered.

Naked is written and directed by Mike Leigh. It stars David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Greg Cruttwell, Claire Skinner, Peter Wright, Ewen Bremner and Gina McKee. Music is by Andrew Dickinson and cinematography by Dick Pope.Johnny (Thewlis) is an unemployed wastrel who has to flee Manchester after indulging in his sexually violent proclivities. Heading for London to seek out an old girlfriend, Johnny encounters a number of people more hapless and lost than he is.Proles, Plebs and Potheads.Mike Leigh's brutal and raw character study remains as potent today as it was on release in post Thatcher Britain. Sometimes coined as a film for masochists or misogynists, Naked is actually for neither. For sure it isn't setting out to cheer you up, it's relentlessly restless and intense, it doesn't cut corners or operate under a banner of political convenience. Yet it does have intelligent depth to the point where the deeper you dig the more troubling Leigh's observations become. This allows Leigh and his brilliant cast to leave indelible images, to bring out themes that simply refuse to leave the conscious, where the observation of a society filled with sad, lonely and desperate people provides the discomfort of the human form stripped, well, naked.Ever seen a dead body?Only my own…Johnny is an intellectual, an intelligent man, even charming, he can chat freely on the world and man's existence in it. But he has unhealthy appetites and a knack for latching onto emotional discord. Posit this with a backdrop of dirty streets, cheap cafés and grungy flats, and there's a starkness about the narrative that scars the soul, aided considerably by Dickinson's edgy violin based score and Pope's stripped back colour photography. A concurrent character study with that of Johnny is that of Jeremy/Sebastian (Cruttwell), the definition of Yuppiedom gone wrong, the devil with a Filofax who is both cruel and predatory, he's the polar opposite of scruffy Johnny, but both represent a London that's far from the bright lights and big city so many hopeless dreamers set off in search of.A sick boy in search of Booze, Beans and a Bath.The Jeremy/Sebastian axis feels very much like satire, this also is something that makes Naked so strong, it is quite often funny. True, the humour here is clinical and comes in spiked barbs, but there are laughs to be had here, the kind that deftly dovetail with a pervading sense of bleakness, finding wit in the most unlikely of places. What is Leigh trying to say in all this? As usual he isn't offering up solutions to his questions, he demands you observe and respond, while he asks his actors to take the material and respond in kind, which they do, led by a quite extraordinary performance by Thewlis. Cannes agreed, awarding Thewlis with the Best Actor Award whilst also bestowing Leigh with the Best Director Award. Both were richly deserved.Never gratuitous, Naked is a sensitive and thoughtful film, yes it's tough to witness at times, it's meant to be, but this is a searing masterpiece that demands to be seen more than once. 10/10