Deep South v.1 n.1 (February, 1995)
It's several weeks now since I saw this powerful and troubling film--too late for a rawly immediate response and perhaps too soon for a considered one--but faces, voices and gestures have been imprinted into my memory and the emotional impact of the whole has scarcely dulled.
In his recent films and television plays--Meantime (1983), Life is Sweet (1990) and High Hopes (1988) stand out--Leigh depicts a range of characters struggling to make sense of their lives amidst a chaotic and indifferent urban wilderness. In Naked (1993) Leigh takes us on a unsettling picaresque journey through an alienating London landscape of seedy flats and deserted office blocks in the company of the protagonist Johnny (played faultlessly by David Thewlis), an engaging dropout whose one weapon against the world is his coruscating verbal wit. In the figure of Johnny, Leigh has created a depth and complexity of characterisation far removed from the likes of the one-dimensional "Mr Know-it-all" Keith Pratt in his television play Nuts in May (1976), or even the rounded characters in the later films. This fullness of persona arises partly because Leigh has allowed one character to dominate so much of the action--Johnny is on screen in nearly every scene, and is a significant absence when he is not. He is complex too because he elicts strong and contradictory responses in us as we follow his progress; at different points in the film we feel attracted and repelled, or sometimes just infuriated by his pointless garrulity and inability to break out of his situation. We warm to his often intensely witty and amusing blarney, but at the same time share the frustration of the character who belts him when he simply won't stop talking. His silver tongue allows him to inveigle his way into the arms (and beds) of a procession of women, but once there he is incapable of making any kind of love, and can only take a perverse revenge for the gamut of psychic wounds that life has dealt him. A foil to him in this respect is Jeremy, the vicious young property speculator (the only figure who might justify the often-repeated claim that Leigh's characters are overdrawn) who takes a straightforwardly sadistic pleasure in his abuse of women. The scene in which the drugged-out Sophie is raped by him, and his supercilious indifference afterwards, is horrifying.
The film works out its powerful themes in a multiplicity of ways. Particular episodes home in with a peculiar symbolic resonance. There is the Beckettian scene in which a fly-by-night poster-sticker pastes up dozens of his wares only to make another round of the same posters immediately afterwards wielding cancellation notices. Perhaps the symbolic core of the movie is the long sequence set in a vast and vacant office block, newly-built and full of high-tech gadgetry, in which the only inhabitants are a philosophical night-watchman and the dishevelled and tormented Johnny. The guard's invitation to the young derelict to enter this warm haven is a wholly unexpected act of compassion and carries something of the emotional charge of a biblical parable. But once inside their futuristic cocoon, discoursing furiously and with complete futility about the coming Apocalypse and the Mark of the Beast, they become the only two souls--utterly lost--in a world deserted by God.
The film thus offers considerable thematic richness and one could follow up in detail a number of potent threads. One of these relates to the power of speech, a motif that Leigh handles with unobtrusive deftness. Johnny's unstoppable loquacity and verbal pyrotechnics stand in contrast to the sheer inarticulacy of many of the other characters. The shop-girl he picks up experiences a welter of confused feelings that she is unable to express in coherent speech; the manic young Scotsman searching wildly for his lost girlfriend can communicate only in grunts and muffled profanities; the yuppy flatmate (Sandra) fresh off the plane from Zimbabwe, has the infuriating habit of leaving every sentence half-completed. In terms of their ability to grapple with their situation and set their lives in order the characters are literally "infants", unable to articulate. Paradoxically, Johnny's overdeveloped powers of speech and language have left him in just the same predicament as those who cannot speak. Louise, Johnny's original London contact, remains his steady friend throughout, but her calm small voice is overwhelmed in the chaotic welter of sound and silence.
Naked offers the viewer a sequence of painfully dysfunctional encounters and failures of communication in a suitably bleak and marginalised setting. Leigh himself has no difficulty in communicating the message that in a sick society, healthy human relationships are impossible. A grim vision indeed, but realized with wit and dexterity and offering a great deal to stimulate and challenge ear, eye, mind and heart.
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