naked review
film by Mike Leigh (1993)
A lot of Mike Leigh heads won’t appreciate this, but there is a very disconcerting throughline from High Hopes’s Cyril (Phil Davis) to Naked’s Johnny (David Thewlis). I had this epiphany during Cyril’s defenestration of the very soul of that poor woman who had the gall to out-socialist him by assisting the Sandinistas with their coffee harvest, under massive personal risk. Cyril, obviously, doesn’t need to do this, but because he’s a sadist disguised as a Cuddly Sweater Social Critic, he feels the urge to call her life’s calling stupid and useless in the most degrading scene this side of Salo.
Review by James Carneiro | December 22, 2024
I’ll give Naked this: Leigh’s Patented Actor-Director Dialogue Workshopping is unimpeachable here. No matter how horrific the context, this is a film aglow with the joys of the English language. The characters, while live action cartoons, are (almost) always given something lovely to loll their tongues around. Sure, it’s still heavily weighted toward David Thewlis and his Manic Skeet Preaching, but at the very least the Suffering Women (and cherubic security guard) are let in on the glottal action. Somewhat.
There is danger in dialoging too much with a Terminal Monologer. He has to be the funniest person in the room. And it is genuinely funny. I laughed a lot and immediately felt terrible because it was coming from the mouth of a (pick one): rapist, debaser, sadist, mooch, manipulator, duvet snatcher, philosophy 2200 megalomaniac. He doesn’t even buy his own fucking cigarettes. Thewlis has a warped power here, the power to bowl over any obstacle because He’s Adept At Speaking. You know he’s bad news, you know he’s going to hurt you, but because he’s completely inhuman and lives in a Parallel Universe of Narcissistic Japery, you just… let him in. He never forces entry in this entire film. No lock is broken.
Leigh, sadistic imp that he is, tries to fool us with Katrin Cartlidge’s Scabrous Dole Goth. I really loved this character Sophie. Of all the Suffering Women, she’s the only one who can genuinely dialogue with Thewlis. The other women can react to him, but she can actually keep him on his toes with her own Joker-Lipped Musing. They can, as the kids say, match each other’s freak. For a time it’s almost a warped romantic comedy. When Johnny’s more “normal” ex bursts in and finds them canoodling and giggling on the couch, practically levitating on pot smoke, I tricked myself into thinking, maybe she can fix him. The five least reliable words in the English language!
No, Johnny feels threatened because, as always, he must be the funniest person in the room. Any incursion on his “shtick” makes him feel, I believe, lesser, fading into the wallpaper. If she’s as witty as me, or—god forbid—wittier, I am no longer The Protagonist of the Universe. The brutalization which follows is even worse than the opening one because we, either, feel a kinship with the victim, or feel stupid for being (temporarily) fooled. After this point any further sexual violence feels, if not only redundant, then Leigh getting off to something he should feel deeply ashamed of.
But there is more to this film! And it’s genuinely fascinating! While Johnny is plying the sordid London streets for more victims and/or cigarettes, he makes the acquaintance of The Guileless Security Chap (Peter Wight). This man is defending a Thatcherite innovation: empty office space intentionally kept naked for speculation. A simple man protecting empty space. Now there’s a socioeconomic contradiction Mark Fisher would cream his ratty Dockers over.
Guileless Security Chap is a Mainline Protestant, which is why he takes umbrage to Johnny’s End Times Nihilism. I admit, he almost sounds compelling, if not fully sane, when using the Book of Revelation as Conspiracy Lode Stone for why humanity will come to an end in 1999. He’s half carnival barker, half QAnon. Guileless Security Chap’s protestations are a welcome counterpoint, if not a little precious. Sometimes you just need a wholesome, ruddy-faced man to stand up to an asshole.
At this moment, Johnny has (1) flash of brilliance, the sole observation which isn’t based in his own narcissism – The Impossibility of the Present. He observes that while we make sense of our own existence in terms of Past and Future, it’s impossible to ever actually feel, or even comprehend the present. Want to feel it? It just happened. While you were trying to comprehend it, it became the past. It exists outside any frame of reference. You can try to anticipate it, look ahead at 10 minutes from now like an oncoming train, but it’s impossible to catch an oncoming train. Oh shoot, it’s the past now. The only way one could truly comprehend the present would be to freeze space-time itself. Even LSD can’t help you with that.
This film does not know what to do with itself after the Space-Time Nocturnal Odyssey. We are intruded upon by Bisexual Menace Tory, who (gasp) commits more sexual violence. I’ll grant Greg Cruttwell that his performance is still hilarious, especially when he’s reclining around the flat in a Speedo.
I’ve never come around on Mike Leigh because he suffers from what I call The Orwell Conniption Fit. This is a breed of “socialist” thought rooted more in nursing middle class grievances than actually harboring the collective power of poor people. I think the bourgeoisie is gauche too, and I suppose I dislike whatever the hell a Nepo Baby is, but the thing about “the ruthless criticism of all that exists” is you eventually have to talk to a poor person. I’m really sorry you never got into Oxbridge, Mike.
Still… this was a searing experience. My internal monologue whiplashed between “The English language gives me reason for living” and “I need to stop fucking around and donate to RAINN when I get paid again.” Johnny – and by extension Leigh and his entourage – have been blessed with something incredible, which is being clever on demand. No-one can do it like them. I bet they come across as extremely funny at parties. I would laugh far too loudly. But by 3 AM, when half are comatose and the whispers feel like fangs and you’re still going, performing for an audience of only yourselves, you have well and truly reached a point where you strained so hard to be clever you forgot how to be funny.
Author
Reviewed and published by James Carneiro. Initially caught the film bug while cruising for used copies of Bergman flicks/bootleg concert footage at Disc Replay. These days, he’ll review quite anything, though he is partial to Italian neorealism, American underground film, and whoever is using cinema as a method of interrogating power structures. Feel free to follow him on Letterboxd.
Take a look at more film reviews here on our website. Explore a variety of films that can help you decide your next movie pick.
Middle-aged Giulietta grows suspicious of her husband, Giorgio, when his behavior grows increasingly questionable. One night when Giorgio initiates a seance amongst…
A decadent London aristocrat hires a man-servant to attend to his needs. However, the balance of power starts to shift. Joseph Losey’s 1963 film, The Servant is…
Envisioned on the picturesque coast of Southern California and based on the book of the same title, the collaborative efforts to put Midnight Cowboy on screen resulted…
Also known as the Kitchen Sink movement, was a transformative era in British cinema that emerged in the late 1950s and continued till the late 1960s. It was a period…
A cult film is a movie that builds a devoted following without achieving mainstream success or widespread critical praise at the time of its release. These films are…
Arthouse film refers to a category of cinema known for its artistic and experimental nature, usually produced outside the major film studio system. These films prioritize artistic…