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
