Here Renoir’s titular antihero is one Priape Boudu (Michel Simon), a complex tramp bent on seduction, self-sabotage, and trouble. The other big referential salute from Johnny is to one of Leigh’s favorite films, Jean Renoir’s 1932 comedy of manners, Boudu Saved from Drowning. He even shrouds himself in a black coat, giving him a shadowy and somber disposition, like a vigilant tragedian. In the same way that Hamlet is continually witty, crazy, and incessantly speaking to everyone in his orbit, so too does Johnny. As a Hamlet-esque character, it’s no accident that William Shakespeare’s Dane is a huge influence on the character. It’s only fitting that a character capable of such lyrical caprice and also such self-destruction as Johnny also have something of the Bard in his veins. “Johnny’s an idealist, certainly not a cynic, which is how he’s often portrayed.” From the film’s opening where we bear uncomfortable witness to him having rough sex with a woman in a Manchester alley to the final fleeting frames as he staggers and gimps away down the middle of the road to God know’s where, Johnny is impossible to ignore, and, for all his many and numerous flaws, is deeply fascinating and often utterly charming.Īs the audience gets familiar with Johnny it is soon acknowledged that he’s a self-destructive cyclone with an askew moral compass, and yet he’s a man capable of tenderness, insight, wit, and whimsey, who repeatedly expresses rich and arousing bursts of poetry and perception. Johnny is a wonderfully complex antiheroĬertainly the most compelling element to Naked is its problematic protagonist and antihero, Johnny. All the characters in my film are dealing with pretentiousness.”Ħ. The tension between that and what’s behind the mask. “ about masks, it’s about the thing we are forced to be, that society expects us to be. Photographed with an unexpected high-contrast lensing from cinematographer Dick Pope, a regular collaborator of Leigh’s, this specific stylization lends Naked a narrow, bleak, and desolate sheen. This allows for a largely improvisational aesthetic, and while risky, in the case of Naked, the rich insights and surprising compassionate gaps feel all the more convincing and 24-karat. Like much of Leigh’s work, the process of making the film begins with the creation of the characters, long before there’s a script, and often story cues and other cinematic elements derive from the workshopping process that Leigh and his cast endure. Shockingly, the script from which Naked sprang was a scant 25 pages long. And yet, when considering Leigh’s distinguished and impressive body of work there is one film that sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb and that film is the visionary, volatile, and poignant pitch-black tragicomedy, Naked (1993).Īrguably Leigh’s finest, fiercest, and most unforgettable film, Naked may also be the best British film in recent memory, artfully capturing the zeitgeist of the 1990s, tapping into the millennial anxiety that was everywhere at the time. There are few directors working today that can lay bare the pained complexity of society like Mike Leigh, be it the “kitchen sink realism” of films like High Hopes (1988), Life is Sweet (1990) or Secrets & Lies (1996) or in his meticulous rendered biopics like Topsy-Turvy (1999), and Mr.
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Naked remains Mike Leigh’s most visionary film The following list shall articulate a handful of reasons why Naked is such a raw, rowdy, funny, and terribly troubling masterwork, and a film that, nearly 25 years on, remains a dark and shining jewel of British cinema.ħ. His nocturnal odyssey of London will connect disparate lives, doomsday augury, danger, tenderness, savagery, strange comedy, and resonant poetry.
#Naked and funny cast full
Johnny (David Thewlis) is a gloom and doom drifter, full of strange fascination and constant dazzle, he’s in trouble and on the run.
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Austere and uncompromising, Mike Leigh’s tragicomic film from 1993, Naked, is arguably his level best and certainly the bleakest British masterpiece of the 1990s.Ī controversial and compelling compass of urban society, this staggering arthouse triumph––it won best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival––is a showcase of several talents and a sullen pièce de résistance.