Naked (1993 film)

Last updated

Naked
Naked poster.jpg
Canadian poster
Directed by Mike Leigh
Written byMike Leigh
Produced by Simon Channing Williams
Starring
Cinematography Dick Pope
Edited by Jon Gregory
Music by Andrew Dickson
Production
company
Distributed by First Independent Films
Release date
  • 5 November 1993 (1993-11-05)
Running time
131 minutes [1]
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Box office$1.8 million (US)

Naked is a 1993 British black comedy drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring David Thewlis as Johnny, a loquacious intellectual, philosopher and conspiracy theorist. The film won several awards, including best director and best actor at Cannes. Naked marked a new career high for Leigh as a director and made the then-unknown Thewlis an internationally recognised star. [2]

Contents

Plot

In a Manchester alley, Johnny is having sex with a woman, who initially encourages him but then protests that he is hurting her, pushes him away, and runs off vowing that "her Bernard" will get vengeance on him for this. Johnny grabs his things from his apartment, steals a car, and flees to Dalston, a "scrawny, unpretentious area" in east London. He seeks refuge at the home of Louise, a former girlfriend from Manchester, who is not happy to see him. Louise works as a file clerk and lives with two flatmates, the unemployed Sophie, whom she calls her "hippy-dippy friend", and the primary tenant Sandra, a nurse who is away in Zimbabwe.

Johnny seduces Sophie while treating Louise coldly, but soon tires of her. He leaves and walks around central London, expounding his world view at length to anyone who will listen. Among the people he meets are Archie, a young Scottish man looking for his girlfriend Maggie on Brewer Street, and Brian, a security guard who looks after an empty office building at night, which Johnny calls "the most tedious job in England", while planning to move to a seaside cottage in the future. [3]

After pursuing a drunk woman and rejecting her when he notices a skull and crossbones tattoo on her shoulder, Johnny follows a young cafe worker home but is thrown out when she starts crying. He hitches a ride with a man hanging posters around town until the man, exasperated by Johnny's nonstop haranguing, throws him down in the street and kicks him before driving off with Johnny's duffel bag containing his clothes and books. Johnny wanders the streets and is severely beaten by a wandering gang of thugs.

He returns to Louise's residence to find that their landlord Jeremy (aka Sebastian), a psychopathic and amoral yuppie and rapist, has let himself into the apartment and raped Sophie. Sophie is desperate to get Jeremy out of the house, but she and Louise fear the police will not help. They try to keep the injured Johnny quiet, but he has a fit that awakens the sleeping Jeremy.

Sandra returns early from her trip. Though horrified by the state of the apartment, she tends to Johnny's injuries. Louise drives Jeremy from the house by feigning interest in him, then pulling a knife on him. He departs, leaving behind several hundred pounds. Feeling desolate and rejected, Sophie flees the house with her few possessions. Louise and Johnny seemingly reconcile and discuss returning to Manchester together, but once she leaves for work, Johnny steals the money and hobbles out into the streets.

Cast

Production

Background and development

Leigh first had the idea for the story while a student in Manchester in the early 1960s: "We had a very enlightened teacher who endlessly reminded us that the next total eclipse would be in August 1999. Later I started thinking about the millennium and the end of the world. In 1992 the millennium was impending, so I brought that idea to the film." [2]

In 1965, Leigh had teamed up with David Halliwell, hired the Unity Theatre for a fortnight, and directed the first production of Halliwell's Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs . According to theatre critic Michael Coveney, "Malcolm Scrawdyke is clearly a precursor of Johnny in Naked. Scrawdyke was a loutish art student and absurd ideologue from Huddersfield who had trouble with girls and a hatred for his teachers...the play shared a deeply felt schoolboy coarseness with Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi , a piece originally written as a vicious attack on a loathed mathematics master." [3]

Leigh's method, as in all his character dramas, consisted of elaborate improvisational rehearsals with the cast to develop the characters' background stories and traits. The actors interacted with the outside world and each other while in character until Leigh told them to come out of character and be themselves. [4] The dialogue produced from these interactions was then edited, or "distilled", to form the script, based on a minimal plot outline by Leigh. The cast was not allowed to discuss their characters with one another outside of rehearsals, as Leigh, for realism, would rather they meet and interact as they would in real life. [5] Thewlis's background reading for the part of Johnny included Voltaire's Candide , the teachings of the Buddha and James Gleick's Chaos , [3] as well as the Bible and the Qur'an. [2]

Principal photography

After weeks of improvisation, filming took place in London from 9 September to 16 December 1992. Sandra's Neo-Gothic home was an actual interior/exterior location that Leigh featured heavily, particularly in the last shot of the film, as its corner location allowed for wide street views. [5]

The scenes between Johnny and Brian the security guard came from an eight-hour improvisation. The uncut shot of Johnny and Brian in silhouette, where Johnny expounds on his convoluted apocalyptic conspiracy theory, had 26 takes, but Leigh ended up using one of the earliest. The film's dialogue has a loose, improvisational quality but, according to Thewlis, the only improvisation filmed on location was the scene of Johnny meeting and antagonising the poster man. [5]

The song sung by Johnny and Louise near the film's end, "Take me back to Manchester when it's raining", was one Leigh used to sing with his friends in Habonim ("the Builders"), the international socialist Jewish youth movement he joined as a schoolboy. After the film was released, Leigh heard from a retired schoolmaster at Stand Grammar in Whitefield, Greater Manchester, who had written the song for a school revue in 1950. [3]

Themes

The film is dark, monochromatic and claustrophobic, with subtle visual references to film noir and Alfred Hitchcock. Many shots are in stairwells and in borrowed flats whose tenants are hostile toward or unaware of the decor, making them seem disconnected from cultural touchstones and their place in their homes. Alienation, sexual violence and misogyny, addiction and depression are touched upon as Johnny meets various rootless individuals who work in dead-end jobs or are unemployed. [5]

Intelligent, educated and eloquent, Johnny is also deeply embittered and egotistical. He tends to dominate conversations with his aggressive intellectualism and theories about modern culture. His tactics are based on a particular form of intellectual bullying, directed at strangers and intimate partners alike, and summed up in domineering, scholastic barrages drawn from eclectic sources. His overall behaviour is reckless, self-destructive, and at times borderline sadistic, and shows a penchant for aggressive sexual domination at least twice in the film.

Biographer Sheridan Morley described Johnny as "Alfie in the grips of Thatcherite depression"—thus, according to critic Michael Coveney, "cross fertilising Bill Naughton's chirpy cockney Lothario, immortalised by Michael Caine, with the dark sinister disaffection of the new underclass—a neat way of indicating that the Swinging Sixties had degenerated into the nauseated Nineties." Coveney said that Leigh had captured something of the anxiety, rootless cynicism, and big-city disaffection of the time. [3]

Ben Myers, in a Guardian article calling Naked Mike Leigh's "finest work" and "the best British film in recent history", elaborated on the many theories filmgoers have had on whom Johnny might represent: "a modern, albeit highly flawed, Jesus attempting to change people's lives. Or perhaps he's the devil himself. Others have suggested it is a post-AIDS morality movie, or a classic urban existentialist tale." [6]

Critics have suggested comparisons with William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning (one of Leigh's favourite films). Hamlet talks "incessantly to the audience [...] assuming a dominance over other characters through expressions of mania, and rapid, witty speech. Thewlis, [...] wrapped like Hamlet in a black and inky coat, [is similarly] socially untethered but burdened with useless knowledge and a vicious, bullying line in repartee." Of the precedent of "idiosyncratic, character-driven film-making" in Boudu, Coveney said: "Both Naked and Boudu explore the tension between the domesticated and the anarchic (this is a central theme, probably the theme running through Leigh's work), and focus this tension in the tragicomedy of a central character." [3]

Reception

The film generated mostly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 89% "fresh" rating based on reviews from 61 critics, with an average score of 8.30/10 and the consensus: "Naked lives up to its title with a thoroughly committed performance from David Thewlis that's backed up with some of Mike Leigh's most powerful direction." [7] Metacritic, another review aggregator, assigned the film a weighted average score of 84 (out of 100) based on 20 reviews from mainstream critics, considered to be "universal acclaim". [8]

Derek Malcolm of The Guardian noted that the film "is certainly Leigh's most striking piece of cinema to date" and that "it tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist." Of Johnny, he writes: "He likes no one, least of all himself, and he dislikes women even more than men, relapsing into sexual violence as his misogyny takes hold. He is perhaps redeemable, but only just. And not by any woman in our immediate view." He praised the directing and performances, singling out Thewlis, writing that he "plays [Johnny] with a baleful brilliance that is certain to make this underrated, but consistently striking, actor into a star name ... [Johnny] is, at his worst, a cold, desperate fish. His redeeming feature is that he still cares." [9]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and analysed the message behind the title, saying it "describes characters who exist in the world without the usual layers of protection. They are clothed, but not warmly or cheerfully. But they are naked of families, relationships, homes, values and, in most cases, jobs. They exist in modern Britain with few possessions except their words." He praised the directing, writing: "[Leigh's] method has created in Naked a group of characters who could not possibly have emerged from a conventional screenplay; this is the kind of film that is beyond imagining, and only observation could have created it." He concluded: "This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel." [10]

Julie Burchill attacked the film in The Sunday Times , saying that Leigh's characters talked like lobotomised Muppets: "sub-wittily, the way Diane Arbus's subjects look." And Suzanne Moore in The Guardian criticised the lethargic females whose lives Johnny routinely ruins: "What sort of realism is this? To show a misogynist and surround him with such walking doormats has the effect, intentional or not, of justifying this behaviour." [11] Lesley Sharp responded: "There are a lot of people who don't go to art house cinemas who do have deeply troubled lives and are at risk ... We do actually live in a misogynistic, violent society and there are a lot of women in abusive relationships who find it very difficult to get out of them. And a lot of men, too." Coveney wrote in the film's defence: "Is there no room for irony, for the idea that in depicting horror in the sex war an artist is exposing them, not endorsing them? And who says that Sophie is an unwilling doormat or that Louise is a doormat at all? It is clear that the latter is taking serious stock of her relationship with Johnny. She exhibits both patience and tenderness in her dealings with him, whereas she finally pulls a knife on Jeremy." [3]

Box office

The film opened in the UK on 22 screens on 5 November 1993 and grossed £52,279 for the weekend for 16th position at the UK box office. [12]

Accolades

AwardDate of ceremonyCategoryRecipient(s)ResultRef.
BAFTA Awards 15 April 1994 Outstanding British Film NakedNominated [13]
Cannes Film Festival 24 May 1993 Best Actor David Thewlis Won [14]
Best Director Mike Leigh Won
Palme d'Or NakedNominated
Chicago International Film Festival 24 October 1993Best FeatureNominated [15]
Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival 1993Best International FilmWon [16]
Toronto International Film Festival 18 September 1993 Metro Media AwardWon [15]
Belgian Film Critics Association 1994 Grand Prix Nominated [17]
Evening Standard British Film Awards 1994Best ActorDavid ThewlisWon [16]
Independent Spirit Awards 19 March 1994 Best Foreign Film NakedNominated [15]
London Film Critics' Circle 1994 British Actor of the Year David ThewlisWon [15]
National Society of Film Critics 3 January 1994 Best Actor Won [18]
New York Film Critics Circle 16 January 1994 Best Actor Won [19]
Best Director Mike Leigh3rd place
Best Film Naked3rd place
Village Voice Film Poll 1999Best Film of the Decade7th place [20]
Year-end lists

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katrin Cartlidge</span> English actress (1961–2002)

Katrin Juliet Cartlidge was an English actress. She first appeared on screen as Lucy Collins in the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside (1982–1983), before going on to win the 1997 Evening Standard Film Award for Best Actress for the Mike Leigh film Career Girls. Her other film appearances included Leigh's Naked (1993), Before the Rain (1994), Breaking the Waves (1996) and From Hell (2001).

<i>Abigails Party</i> 1977 play by Mike Leigh

Abigail's Party is a play for stage and television, devised and directed in 1977 by Mike Leigh. It is a suburban situation comedy of manners, and a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that emerged in Britain in the 1970s. The play developed in lengthy improvisations during which Mike Leigh explored the characters with the actors, but did not always reveal the incidents that would occur during the play. The production opened in April 1977 at the Hampstead Theatre, and returned after its initial run in the summer of 1977, for 104 performances in all. A recording was arranged at the BBC as a Play for Today, produced by Margaret Matheson for BBC Scotland and transmitted in November 1977.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Leigh</span> English writer and director (born 1943)

Mike Leigh is an English writer-director with a career spanning film, theatre and television. He has received numerous accolades, including prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, the Venice International Film Festival, three BAFTA Awards, and nominations for seven Academy Awards. He also received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2014, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1993 Birthday Honours for services to the film industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Thewlis</span> English actor (born 1963)

David Wheeler, better known as David Thewlis, is an English actor and filmmaker. He is known as a character actor and has appeared in a wide variety of genres in both film and television. He has received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and nominations for two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

<i>Peep Show</i> (British TV series) British sitcom television series

Peep Show is a British television sitcom starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, and created by Andrew O'Connor, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. The series was written by Armstrong and Bain, with additional material by Mitchell and Webb, among others. It was broadcast on Channel 4 from 19 September 2003 to 16 December 2015. In 2010, it became the longest-running comedy in Channel 4 history in terms of years on air.

<i>Life Is Sweet</i> (film) 1990 British film

Life Is Sweet is a 1990 British comedy-drama film directed by Mike Leigh, starring Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks and Timothy Spall. Leigh's third cinematic film, it was his most commercially successful title at the time of release. A tragi-comic story, it follows the fortunes of a working-class North London family over a few weeks one summer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lesley Sharp</span> English actress

Lesley Sharp is an English actress, She was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her part in the film The Full Monty (1997), and for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress in 2002 for her role in Bob & Rose (2001).

<i>High Hopes</i> (1988 film) 1988 British film

High Hopes is a 1988 British comedy drama film directed by Mike Leigh, focusing on an extended working-class family living in King's Cross, London, and elsewhere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alison Steadman</span> British actress (born 1946)

Alison Steadman is an English actress. She received the 1977 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for Abigail's Party, the 1991 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress for the Mike Leigh film Life Is Sweet and the 1993 Olivier Award for Best Actress for her role as Mari in the original production of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. In a 2007 Channel 4 poll, the '50 Greatest Actors' voted for by other actors, she was ranked 42.

<i>Damage</i> (1992 film) Film by Louis Malle

Damage is a 1992 romantic psychological drama film directed and produced by Louis Malle and starring Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche, Miranda Richardson, Rupert Graves, and Ian Bannen. Adapted by David Hare from the 1991 novel Damage by Josephine Hart, the film is about a British politician (Irons) who has a sexual relationship with his son's fiancée and becomes increasingly obsessed with her. Richardson was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance as the aggrieved wife of the film's main character.

The London Film Critics' Circle is the name by which the Film Section of The Critics' Circle is known internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edna Doré</span> British actress

Edna Lillian Doré was a British actress. She was known for her bit-part roles in sitcoms and for playing the character of Mo Butcher in EastEnders from 1988 to 1990.

The 59th New York Film Critics Circle Awards honored the best filmmaking of 1993. The winners were announced on 15 December 1993 and the awards were given on 16 January 1994.

<i>Meantime</i> (film) 1983 British film

Meantime is a 1983 British comedy-drama television film directed by Mike Leigh and produced by Central Television for Channel 4. It stars Tim Roth, Phil Daniels and Gary Oldman. It was shown in 1983 at the London Film Festival and on Channel 4 and at the 1984 Berlin International Film Festival. According to the critic Michael Coveney, "the sapping, debilitating and demeaning state of unemployment, the futile sense of waste, has not been more poignantly, or poetically, expressed in any other film of the period."

The Kiss of Death (<i>Play for Today</i>) 9th episode of the 7th series of Play for Today

"The Kiss of Death" is the ninth episode of seventh season of the British BBC anthology TV series Play for Today. The episode was a television play that was originally broadcast on 11 January 1977. "The Kiss of Death" was written and directed by Mike Leigh, produced by David Rose, and starred David Threlfall.

<i>Another Year</i> (film) 2010 film by Mike Leigh

Another Year is a 2010 British comedy-drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh. It stars Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, and Ruth Sheen. It follows a year in the life of an older couple who have been happily married for a long time, making them an anomaly among their friends and family members.

<i>Bleak Moments</i> 1971 British film by Mike Leigh

Bleak Moments is a 1971 British comedy-drama film by Mike Leigh in his directorial debut. Leigh's screenplay is based on a 1970 stage play at the Open Space Theatre, about the dysfunctional life of a young secretary.

Too Much of a Good Thing is a radio play, recorded entirely on location, as if it were a film, by Mike Leigh. Liane Aukin, the 'midwife' of the project, a BBC radio producer, knew Leigh through her brother David, the general manager at Hampstead Theatre. She had initially asked Leigh to revive Abigail's Party on the radio, but he preferred to supply an original piece. Ronald Mason, the head of radio drama, was enthusiastic and allocated £5000.

Home Sweet Home is a 1982 television film devised and directed by Mike Leigh, for the BBC, 'about postmen, parenthood, social workers and sex.' It was Leigh's second collaboration with Play for Today producer Louis Marks, and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin,, and with composer Carl Davis – the musical score featured a quartet of basses –. It stars Timothy Spall, Eric Richard, Tim Barker, Kay Stonham, Su Elliot, Frances Barber, Sheila Kelley, and Lorraine Brunning. It was first broadcast on 16 March 1982. The film was shot on location in Hitchin, Hertfordshire and has a 90 minutes duration.

<i>Anomalisa</i> 2015 film by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

Anomalisa is a 2015 American adult stop-motion psychological comedy-drama film directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson and written by Kaufman. It is based on a 2005 audio play by Kaufman that explores the Fregoli delusion. Anomalisa follows the British middle-aged customer service expert Michael Stone, who perceives everyone as identical except for Lisa Hesselman, whom he meets in a Cincinnati hotel.

References

  1. ↑ "Naked (18)". British Board of Film Classification. 9 August 1993. Retrieved 6 July 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 Jeffries, Stuart. "'I got dangerously close to Johnny'". The Guardian. 14 August 2008. Retrieved 12 November 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Coveney, Michael (1996). The World According to Mike Leigh, pp.19, 21, 25, 27, 29, 32-34, 65-67. HarperCollins, New York. ISBN   0006383394.
  4. ↑ Hoad, Phil. "How We Made Naked," The Guardian. 18 November 2013. Retrieved 16 February 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Leigh, Mike (Director), (1993). Naked (Motion picture). The Criterion Collection. United Kingdom: Leigh, Mike; Thewlis, David; Cartlidge, Katrin.
  6. ↑ Myers, Ben. "Is Naked Britain's most under-rated film?," The Guardian. 20 February 2008. Retrieved on 16 February 2017.
  7. ↑ "Naked (1993)." Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 21 July 2019.
  8. ↑ "Naked." Metacritic. Retrieved 12 November 2014.
  9. ↑ Malcolm, Derek (4 November 1993). "Naked (Review)". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  10. ↑ Ebert, Roger. "Naked (Review)." Chicago Sun-Times. 18 February 1994. Retrieved 12 November 2014.
  11. ↑ Moore, Suzanne. "Reel men don't eat quiche." The Guardian. 4 November 1993. Print. Quoted in Watts, Carol. "Mike Leigh's Naked and the Gestic Economy of Cinema." Women: A Cultural Review. 7.13 (1996): 271. Print.
  12. ↑ "Vote for Dave". Screen International . 12 November 1993. p. 26.
  13. ↑ "Alexander Korda Award for the outstanding British Film of the Year in 1994". British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  14. ↑ "RETROSPECTIVE 1993". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  15. 1 2 3 4 "AWARDS & FESTIVALS NAKED". mubi.com. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  16. 1 2 "Naked Awards". IMDb. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  17. ↑ Decker, Jacques (10 January 1994). "THE UCC GRAND PRIX, "RAINING STONES" WINNER". archives.lesoir.be. Archived from the original on 2 June 2013. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  18. ↑ "Past Awards". nationalsocietyoffilmcritics.com. 19 December 2009. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  19. ↑ Bernard, Jami (19 December 1993). "Critics' Choice: 'List,' 'piano'". Sun Sentinel . Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  20. ↑ "Village Voice Film Poll Take One (1999): Best Films of the Decade (1990-1999)". Letterboxd . 16 June 2015. Retrieved 11 January 2024.
  21. ↑ Dudek, Duane (30 December 1994). "1994 was a year of slim pickings". Milwaukee Sentinel. p. 3.
  22. ↑ King, Dennis (25 December 1994). "SCREEN SAVERS in a Year of Faulty Epics, The Oddest Little Movies Made The Biggest Impact". Tulsa World (Final Home ed.). p. E1.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.