"Naked" (1993) - Movie Review

Johnny (David Thewlis) in Mike Leigh’s “Naked” can sense a lonely soul in a mile’s radius and rant about the obscurity, hopelessness and negative game of life being played by god. He is shabby, thin, dull but flooded with words. He is a voracious reader and practices his philosophy in wanderlust amongst the ditches and darkness of London streets. “Naked” is a weird film about working class characters of London. They can expect old relations showing up unnoticed with an ego of knowing everything but expressing nothing barging into their home. They welcome with half heartedness for old time’s sake while haunted with confusion and fear of what this person has in store. The working class girl is Louise (Lesley Sharp) patching her life in the clockwork London and the uninvited person is Johnny.

This is a film of profound knowledge in writing on characters of discordance and destitute. Johnny is a vicious charmer, rough in sex, low in seriousness and high on intellectual arguments. He is well read, strangely well mannered but is in a homeless state after running off from Manchester. The reason, we see him raping a woman in an alley and afraid of getting beat up, he steals a car and comes to London. He has no hesitations in knocking the door of his former girl friend’s house. He meets her room mate (Katrin Cartlidge) and she lets Johnny in. Both do not introduce themselves and we see Johnny get on with his life abnormalities and intense materialism and curious masturbation of humans in the quest for finding the unknown. She tells she understands if only she can read through the foggy smokes of pot she is smoking. He needs an outlet otherwise the churning factory of the consumed books he read in his mind will reek out in psychotic behaviours every second which he expresses during sex.

A film carries the humour in the sarcastic tones of the characters. Johnny cannot make himself to come in serious terms but that’s his charm. He gets out of Louise’s house and meets people. But he does not intend on the agenda of meeting people, his ego will not allow that. He makes himself the object of curiosity to get a glance, smile or hate to begin his lecture on the simplicity of wasteful life. He does not care if they ignore or listen or oppose or agree because he needs to exercise his mouth and thoughts. He is eloquent and convincing, sometimes astonishingly truthful. He can substantiate the invalidity of present, the validity of merciless and hateful god and the tenacity of this grinding march towards hopelessness. He finds his notes and points in unbelievable control and passion when he meets a security guard named Brian (Peter Wight) with a job of time to chew and empty place to protect. A focal point in the film when Johnny has a listener who grasps the entirety of his ideas even if he does not believes in it.

Being this the first feature I am watching of Mike Leigh, it is intense in its presentation and arbitrary to leave us to grasp the material. The writing is concentrated with deep ideas and tough words which limits us on many occasions to get Johnny. The writing is intentional on that so that people who understand can see the nakedness of this person while one who does not gets perplexed or shifted on by the wit of this guy to forget about it. It is candid in its dialogues because Johnny is stripped off with the regular attire of the social normality. But we never get what Johnny is after for. His fear of attachment is the sole known factor of his psychological inhibitions we learn. May be that’s the reason whenever he gets to know some one, he wants to seduce them and intentionally hurt and humiliate them to distance away from him.

David Thewlis presents a verbose stature of Johnny’s upright values of existence but a depressed and tired physiological representation in his face. He utters the words with a spite of vengeful, self righteousness and vehement tone of acceptance in its content. He acts the passive aggression with wit and frustration in unison. This is a performance which is made to look so easy but has the monumental burden of carrying this personality to be likeable in his desperation and hatred towards life. And with Andrew Dickson’s original score, the suppressed frightening emotions of him over others reverberate.

There is another character of the similar nature in the film, Jeremy (Greg Crutwell) who in all possibility would have been an inspiration to the character of Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho”. He is rich, arrogant and a rapist. His story runs in minimal sequences of his sexual war towards his women. He is the rich unpolished version of Johnny in a way. This is not a film about men demeaning women. It is about the complexities and questions in the current giant society of clockwork which runs as thoughts in frustrating minds of workers and jobless wanderers.

The women in the film are continuously won by the enigma of mysterious candidness of Johnny. Sophie, the café girl (Gina McKee) and Louise are blown away and freaked out by this odd unpredictable personality. The sex is explicit and offensive too. Does the actors were fine with it should be a question to them but those sequences represent these sexually frustrated and dominating men who exactly know their path towards the end. This clear path becomes their demise of their character to vile every day with strangeness, sexual aggressiveness and carelessness a bit too much.