Monthly Archives: December 2021

  • Naked

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Leigh (1993)

    Mike Leigh’s fifth cinema feature, Naked marked a departure from its predecessors in several ways.  This was the first Leigh film more than two hours long, the first to feature on-screen sex and sexual violence.  It was visually more ambitious than his previous work.  Dick Pope, who had made his debut as Leigh’s cinematographer on the fourth feature, Life is Sweet (1990), gives London, where nearly all Naked‘s action takes place, a post-apocalyptic (immediately post-Thatcher?) look.  Andrew Dickson’s score – majoring in ominous, rapid harp strings that give way occasionally to a wrenching cello – is much more obtrusive than his music for Leigh’s High Hopes (1988).  Although High Hopes and Life is Sweet had won prizes, Naked gave Leigh a new level of international recognition.  At the Cannes festival in 1993, he and David Thewlis were named Best Director and Best Actor respectively for their work on the film.

    I’d seen Naked once before, maybe fifteen years ago, and was surprised how little I recalled – David Thewlis’s Johnny talking a blue streak, a few images of a nighttime episode involving him and a security guard played by Peter Wight.  I remembered Johnny inveighing against life-the-universe-and-everything but nothing specific other than his deploring the security man’s body odour.  Although I don’t always like Mike Leigh’s films, most of them have stayed with me more than this one had, and I couldn’t think why.  Now I’ve seen Naked again – at BFI, as part of their complete retrospective of Leigh’s cinema and TV work – the lack of residue isn’t a puzzle.  Despite the distinctive end of days visuals (the sleek, soulless building where the guard works makes a major contribution to these), Naked is dominated by Johnny’s passionate invective.  His monologues contain some remarkable writing, and are brilliantly delivered, but they pay gradually diminishing returns in terms of surprise.  The funny lines are a drop in the ocean of his total wordage.  Although you can’t escape Johnny, you can and do switch off from him, and so from the film as a whole.

    As well as becoming a bore, Johnny is, from the word go, a vicious misogynist.  Naked begins in Manchester, where he rapes a woman in a dark alley, steals a car and sets off for London.  He turns up at the Dalston flat rented by Louise (Lesley Sharp), a former girlfriend and fellow Mancunian, who isn’t happy to see Johnny when she gets home from her dead-end office job.  She shares the flat with two other young women, including oddball, unemployed Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge) – happy to be immediately seduced by Johnny, distraught when he almost as quickly drops her.  During his time in the capital, he mostly wanders around central London, ready to fulminate to anyone who can stand to listen.  He picks up a café worker (Gina McKee) and goes home with her, but she soon gets upset and throws him out.  He eventually returns, the worse for wear, to Louise and Sophie’s place, after being assaulted first by a man who gives Johnny a lift but loses patience with his motormouth, then by a gang.  The flat’s other tenant, Sandra (Claire Skinner), a bossy, self-righteous nurse, returns from a trip abroad.  Infuriated by Johnny’s stream of sarcastic abuse, she nevertheless cleans up his cuts and sees to his injured leg.  As he lies resting, he and Louise talk, and seem to reconcile.  She decides to return to Manchester with him and hurries off to hand in her notice at her workplace.  While she’s out, Johnny pockets several hundred pounds in cash that he finds in the flat.  He hobbles out into the street and goes on his way alone.

    The cash Johnny steals has been left on the premises by the girls’ landlord, Jeremy G Smart aka Sebastian Hawk (Greg Cruttwell), who exited the place more hastily than he’d intended.  Jeremy/Sebastian is another nasty male chauvinist, a yuppie psychopath to complement Johnny’s working-class anti-hero.  After letting himself into the flat, Jeremy assaults Sophie, before holding her and Louise virtually hostage.  In long retrospect, Naked seems both ahead of its time in skewering toxic masculinity and to have dated badly:  the toxicity is facilitated by the feebleness of the women on the receiving end of it.  Mike Leigh allows his female characters to fight back only once, when he needs it to move the story towards a conclusion:  Louise pulls a knife on Jeremy just so that Leigh can get him out of the flat and the way of the main characters.  Still, this is less unconvincing than Louise’s believing Johnny is somehow a reformed character, and that they can make a life together in Manchester.  That too is dictated purely by plot requirements – by how Leigh has decided the film will end.

    Naked raises another question about Leigh’s famously ‘organic’ working methods.  The Wikipedia article on the film quotes the theatre critic Michael Coveney, who compares Johnny with Malcolm Scrawdyke in David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs.  Leigh directed the first stage production of Little Malcolm in 1965; according to Coveney, Malcolm is ‘clearly a precursor’ of Johnny.  Leigh may not, of course, agree with Coveney but the latter’s confident assertion is striking when Leigh’s characters are supposedly originals, developed by him in close, continuing partnership with the actor concerned.  However the protagonist was conceived and developed, and for all Naked‘s faults, David Thewlis puts on an extraordinary show.  He’s a scarecrow figure that often really is scary.  His virtuoso vocal efforts aren’t just a feat of stamina:  Thewlis’s Johnny is so in love  – or in a love-hate relationship – with the sound of his own voice that his jabbering anguish has a sometimes delirious quality.  Every so often, he suggests a different facet to this relentlessly angry young man that comes as a welcome surprise – Johnny smiles, seems almost at peace, when, for a change, he’s doing the listening, to the security guard Brian banging on about reincarnation.

    This is one of several elements that make the nocturnal episode in the deserted office building the film’s strongest.  Another element is Peter Wight’s sympathetic portrait of Brian.  The other supporting performances are a mixed bag.  Lesley Sharp gives Louise increasing warmth and depth and Katrin Cartlidge notice of the abundant eccentricity that would bloom two Leigh films later in Career Girls (1997).  Greg Cruttwell makes Jeremy/Sebastian as one-note hateful as Leigh presumably demanded.  In the monotony stakes, Claire Skinner’s Sandra runs Cruttwell a close second.

    18 November 2021

  • Radio Days

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1987)

    Alongside their two-month Mike Leigh retrospective, BFI are screening a smaller group of films, selected by Leigh, that have ‘inspired’ him.  It’s an eclectic choice for which this viewer’s grateful – an opportunity not just to revisit Jules and Jim and Tokyo Story but also to catch up with work as differently glorious as Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Woody Allen’s Radio Days.

    After breaking into a New York home, two burglars (Paul Herman and Mike Starr) are interrupted by a ringing telephone.  One tells the other to answer it, and he does.  The caller is the host of a radio name-that-tune show, which is being broadcast to a live studio audience.  Three tunes later (‘Dancing in the Dark’, ‘Chinatown, My Chinatown’ and ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’) that audience is applauding loudly:  the burglars have won the show’s jackpot, even though it’s the couple whose house they’re robbing that, next day, take delivery of the winnings.  That’s the start of Radio Days and a taste of things to come.  Except for being radio-themed, it doesn’t relate to anything that follows but Allen rightly takes the view that it’s far too good to omit.  The film is a series of sketches – some, of course, stronger than others but nearly all pretty good – strung together by the depiction of a Jewish household in Rockaway (part of the New York borough of Queens) in the late 1930s and early 1940s, popular songs of the day, and humorously nostalgic recollection of golden-age-of-radio shows and their personnel.  The songs are actual standards of the time.  The shows are mostly invented but based on real ones.  The golden age coincides with the early years of Joe (Seth Green), the film’s protagonist and Woody Allen’s alter ego.

    The burglary episode, like everything else in Radio Days, is narrated in voiceover by Allen as the middle-aged Joe.  Next, he presents his family and their immediate neighbours.  The close-knit, exuberantly bickering household has you smiling from the word go.   Joe introduces his parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker) as ‘two people who could find an argument in any subject’.  (Their opening lines have them disputing whether the Atlantic is better than the Pacific or vice versa.)  They share the Rockaway house with Joe’s grandparents (Leah Carrey and William Magerman), as well as his mother’s two sisters, the sensitive spinster Bea (Dianne Wiest) and the more combatively dissatisfied Ceil (Renée Lippin).  Ceil is married to Abe (Josh Mostel), who regularly returns home with a load of fish acquired from friends who work in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay.  Ceil and Abe’s daughter Ruthie (Joy Newman) isn’t a radio lover quite like the others.  There’s a Carmen Miranda song she enjoys singing along with (Joe’s father and Abe provide the backing); on the whole, though, Ruthie’s entertainment comes from ‘listening to the next door neighbors on the party line’.  All the actors named above are splendid – as are plenty of others too numerous to mention.  It’s satisfying to have Woody Allen present in the film as a continuous voice but represented on the screen by a kid as comically deft and naturally eccentric as Seth Green.

    Other than Joe’s family, the main continuing character is Sally White (Mia Farrow):  the narrative follows her bizarre progress from cigar salesgirl in a club patronised by radio stars to joining their number – as a celebrity gossip commentator of the airwaves.  The Sally subplot is pleasant enough though you know it’s there not because the film needs it but in order to give Mia Farrow – who appeared in every Allen feature from A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) to Husbands and Wives (1992) inclusive – a sizeable role.  Farrow is charming and amusing but limited.  Allen’s previous and more gifted partner, Diane Keaton, in a brief appearance as a chanteuse at a New Year ball, does a lovely job of singing ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To’.  There are pleasingly obvious auditory jokes.  Joe’s favourite radio series is ‘The Masked Avenger’, who ‘I fantasized was a cross between Superman and Cary Grant’:  as a studio recording shot reveals, he’s actually Wallace Shawn.  There’s keen competition for what most annoys Ceil and Abe about each other but her incontinent enthusiasm for a radio ventriloquist (‘How do you know he’s not moving his lips?’) comes high on the list.

    The confidence – which soon comes – that the film is going to carry on making you laugh makes it very reassuring to watch.  Yet Radio Days is sad as well as funny, the two things beautifully fused in Dianne Wiest’s portrait of perennially unlucky-in-love Aunt Bea.  Allen doesn’t take the obvious route of darkening the mood once World War II is underway, even though radio news bulletins cast a shadow.  Instead, he fictionalises a post-war tragedy involving a little girl, which, says Wikipedia, was ‘a landmark event in American television history [my emphasis]’[1], as a means of illustrating how radio brought different audiences together to partake of calamity as well as entertainment.  There is, besides, a gradually increasing sense of regret in this remembrance of things past.  The older Joe signs off with a melancholy recognition that they are past, an admission that the voices he heard on the radio and has never forgotten ‘seem to grow dimmer and dimmer’ with every year that goes by.

    Woody Allen’s view of the period is almost purely nostalgic yet you believe in the world that Radio Days recreates more fully than in those latter-day New York stories of his that use vintage popular songs to try and express Allen’s inveterate love of the place.  Early on, Joe/Woody’s voiceover apologises for romanticising Rockaway.  Radio Days is essentially self-indulgent but when a film’s words, music and performers give as much pleasure as this one does, who cares?  You feel less inclined to accept an apology than to give thanks.

    16 November 2021

    [1] ‘Kathryn Anne Fiscus (August 21, 1945 – April 8, 1949) was a three-year-old girl who died after falling into a well in San Marino, California. The attempted rescue, broadcast live on KTLA, was a landmark event in American television history’.

     

Posts navigation