Naked is a 1993 British black comedy drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring David Thewlis as Johnny, a loquacious intellectual 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.
Plot
In a Manchester alley, Johnny rapes a woman. When her family arrive and chase him away, he 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.
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 psychotic 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
David Thewlis as Johnny Fletcher
Lesley Sharp as Louise Clancy
Katrin Cartlidge as Sophie
Greg Cruttwell as Jeremy G. Smart/Sebastian Hawk
Claire Skinner as Sandra the Nurse
Peter Wight as Brian, the security guard
Ewen Bremner as Archie the Scotsman with a tic
Susan Vidler as Maggie
Gina McKee as The Cafe Girl
Elizabeth Berrington as Giselle
Darren Tunstall as Poster Man
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."
In 1965, Leigh 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 theater 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."