Neked

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In the early 1990s, “problematic” was a term seldom heard. Almost three decades on, this seems like the film for which the word was invented. Jeremy rapes two women, and is unmistakably a villainous piece of well-groomed male rage. Johnny’s taste for rough sex is what will have audiences squirming at exactly how much consent is occurring during his surprisingly frequent couplings. And Johnny is a predator, an abuser whose evident anguish and self-hate does not entitle him to a moment of our pity. He is at the centre of a fiercely pessimistic story that is not leavened, as many of Leigh’s films are, with redeeming features. This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn. King, Dennis (25 December 1994). "SCREEN SAVERS In a Year of Faulty Epics, The Oddest Little Movies Made The Biggest Impact". Tulsa World (Final Homeed.). p.E1.

Naked then. Challenging, horrifying, beautiful, objectionable, funny, exciting and exhausting. When was the last time you saw anything like that at the cinema? I imagined Johnny’s conspiracy theory babbling about barcodes, the Book of Revelations, and millennial apocalypse would now resemble the paranoid fantasies of Q-anoners. But, his proclivity for seeing the end of the world in human behaviour seems more relevant in this age of climate change and the lip service paid to minimising it. Leigh says Johnny, “isn’t a victim of conspiracy theoriyitis. He enjoys talking about this stuff but it’s banter and letting off steam.” For me this is at odds with Thewlis’ conviction when delivering those monologues. All of these stylistic choices are right for "Naked," and so is the title, which 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. Plus, Johnny is an emotional vampire. He cannot bring himself to be close to people, but feeds off their energy, leaving most encounters invigorated while the other party is drained. Note how often the character, vampire like, waits to be invited into someone’s home or workplace. The world is indifferent to them, and they to it. To some degree, they don't even know what's hit them. Johnny has a glimmer. His response is not hope or a plan. It is harsh, sardonic laughter.

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Perhaps surprisingly, he does later manage to scrape up some pity for Archie’s girlfriend Maggie’s plight and even buys her some food. Ironically, she unintentionally supplies one of the cruellest moments in the film when he she guesses his age as forty and doesn’t remotely believe him when he reveals he’s twenty-seven. 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. BFI’s new edition delivers some great supplementary material along with a far cleaner and sharper looking presentation in comparison to Criterion’s 10-year-old edition. Also here, as with the Criterion edition, BFI includes Leigh’s 17-minute short film, The Short & Curlies, starring Thewlis, Alison Steadman, Sylvestra le Touzel, and Wendy Nottingham. Compared to Naked it feels like a light, fluffy comic bit, though for this viewing it had a gloomier feel. The story kind of focuses around the awkward relationship between Thewlis’ character and a pharmacist (chemist) that he's trying to woo over. Their interactions are awkward, even painful in a variety of ways (like, for starters, how Thewlis’ character has to insert unfunny punchlines in every conversation), but the characters are so vividly fleshed out, from their disappointments to their hang-ups, despite nothing direct ever really being said.

Naked, I just want to... stop that song reference right there. Yeah, forget Falco, although, honestly, I can't say that he's too much cheesier than reference that I don't mind going on in my head when I see this film's title: "You walk into the room, with your pencil in your hand; you see somebody naked, and you say, 'Who is that man?'". It's an at least more fitting reference, because this film can get a little weird at times, and on top of that, this film is a production by [u]Thin Man[/u] Films. Mike Leigh must be a Bob Dylan fan, which would make sense, because he seems to be about as passionate as Dylan is about talking about middle and working-class society in a slightly serious manner that's still kind of amusing, whether he intends for it to be or not. I'm really not sure if he's trying to be funny here, because as cheesy as the title sort of is, this film is a little toned down, comically speaking, for Leigh, as well it should be if it's going to have so much rape, as that's hardly a laughing matter. Now, if the lead were to suddenly turn into a werewolf and eat the woman or something, that would be a little more colorful, even though I can't say that I would be especially surprised. Well, maybe I would be a little surprised, because this film came out 11 years before "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", but as crazy as David Thewlis has always looked, he's got to be some kind of creepy, supernatural creature in real life, which is where we get this, "Werewolves East of London" (Within the first ten minutes of the film, he really does "joke" about once being a werewolf), which is fair, but a bit of a challenge, often more so than at should be, at least as a character study. He meets a homeless and aggressive young man from Edinburgh called Archie, who speaks (or shouts might be a more accurate description) with an accent that Johnny finds almost impenetrable although not as impenetrable as Archie finds his spiel about self-fulfilling prophecies and Nostradamus.Mr. Mason is a pretty young principal of a thriving private high school. The dude is in his late 30s and has had a pretty smooth ride up until a few weeks ago. He used to love going to his job and monitoring the success of his perfect high-society students. However, the girls in one of his classes are growing restless in their final year of school. These 18+ teens are having none of the discipline they were used to just one year ago. It’s all about showing off, making TikTok videos, and being sexually provocative. Mr. Mason is a young principal, and this is the first time BFI then closes the disc off with a new trailer advertising its restoration, along with a self-playing image gallery featuring production photos and posters from a handful of countries. BFI also includes a booklet featuring an essay by Caitlin Quinlan on the film’s structure, its toxic male characters, and how the film handles the two lead women in the film. This essay is then followed by an essay by Lou Thomas on how Leigh has presented London in his films. Notes around the disc’s supplements, written by Vic Pratt, close it off. a b c d e f g Coveney, Michael (1996). The World According to Mike Leigh, pp.19, 21, 25, 27, 29, 32-34, 65-67. HarperCollins, New York. ISBN 0006383394. Supervising this one, Pope has applied that skip-bleach look, and he seems to be far happier with this presentation judging by his comments in that interview. Since the process is rarely done with the original negative (it’s usually done during the creation of the interpositive or internegative as to not damage the original elements) the colours have more than likely been adjusted here digitally, with the notes stating “[t]he new colour grading reproduces the film’s original bleach bypass process, referring to an original 1993 release print held in the BFI’s collection.” Memories of Murder had a similar thing done to it for its 4K restoration, though with mixed results. I have no doubt that director Bong Joon-ho did use the bleach-bypass process for the film during its initial release, but recreating it for that restoration (as presented on Criterion’s disc) did give the final image a bit of a phony, digital look. Essentially, despite my finding the presentation decent in the end,it didn’t look like it was accomplished through any sort of photochemical process. 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]

Equal in those he showers with rapid-fire insults and bile, elements of Thewlis’ performance suggest his character is suffering PTSD from an unnamed trauma. But women unquestionably bear the brunt of Johnny’s cruelty as much as Jeremy’s. Nor do matters improve with the arrival of Sandra ( Claire Skinner), whose name is on the lease. She has a job, apparently thinks of herself as being normal and productive, and offers free advice and criticism, but the film invites us to see how precariously close she is to falling into the same abyss as her friends.Speaking of Naked’s infernal yuppie, the movie’s depiction of the obscene disparity between haves and have-nots has also risen in relevance. For Willis, “things that on first watch years ago were peripheral, now seem much more significant. Particularly the way Johnny and Archie exist on the edge of homelessness and destitution. That’s such a big issue today, it now seems much more central to the film.”