Naked, as implied by its title, is raw, uncompromising cinema, the least comforting manifestation to date of what Mike Leigh calls his "celebration of human experience"; yet there are also moments of tenderness, necessary chinks of compassion spearing the murk. It is also bitingly, appallingly funny.
The film was borne out of Leigh's then preoccupations with the tension between spiritual and material values, some tougher aspects of the relationship between the sexes, and above all, a profound sense of impending, apocalyptic doom. 'Pre-Millennium Tension', Tricky called it in 1996, for an album steeped in paranoia, "psychic pollution" and regret. "Forever - what does that mean?" asks his lover. "It means we'll manage" Tricky grimly retorts. Manage. For Naked's damaged roster of characters, churning out their faded sexual rituals or wearily braced for more verbal and physical trauma, simply 'managing' would be a desirable state to attain.
As Leigh told 'Cineaste' in 1994, "In so far as Naked is about England, the fabric of society is collapsing. People are insecure, there is a sense of disintegration which is, as much as anything else, a legacy of the Tories." The previous decade's boom and bust had left almost every strata of society reeling, with a great many financially or emotionally ill-equipped for the subsequent recession, the period in which the film is set. It is hardly surprising that more people were admitted into psychiatric care during the 1980s than in any previous decade; subsequently released into communities which no longer existed or didn't care about them.
The Poll Tax levy, fleecing the poorest communities while propping up the richest, had also contributed to more numbers of homeless than ever. And Naked's original remit was to have focused on the street, until Leigh decided the subject was too one-dimensional. "Maggie!" bawls twitching Scots straggler Archie (Ewen Bremner) helplessly, in one of the film's subtler allusions. "She's gone, mate" mutters David Thewlis's Johnny, chief pallbearer of the post-Thatcherite malaise. "Those days are over."
However, Naked ought not to be taken chiefly as a state-of-the-nation polemic: the film working out of a broader European tradition of dark, existential allegory. Here, the homeless are those who have been disenfranchised from family, jobs, values - and us, for we can only guess at their stories, as they stumble like medieval cripples through a heightened, Dante-esquire vision of urban London.
The sole emblematic landmark to be glimpsed is the BT Tower looming high above the horizon: more unreachable communication. Appropriately, for a drama exploring rootlessness and displacement, the Naked City (shot in pitiless bleach-bypass to imbue the film with a grainy, Dickensian quality) has collapsed in on itself, having entered a black hole respecting no spatial perimeters. Johnny's sleepless odyssey through the capital's cafes, empty office blocks and bedroom floors will take him from Soho to Shoreditch in minutes.
Almost everybody in Naked is on the move, arriving or departing, to Andrew Dickson's driving, melancholy score. But rarely digging in, lending the film its picaresque quality - a latter-day pilgrim's progress through the Inferno. As befitting a film dealing with the end of days, mythical and Biblical references abound, from 'The Iliad' to the 'Book Of Revelation': Johnny's number of the Beast 'barcode' rant had been prompted by a pamphlet handed to the actor in the street, and its execution - an astonishing verbal juggling act in silhouette - would take around two dozen takes to perfect.
With his head framed against the halo-making rays of a Roman clock, Johnny is both broken Christ and testing devil, crying out to save souls, to reach somebody - anybody - while simultaneously flagellating them for their crucifying ennui. "Do you believe in God?" he's asked at one juncture. "Of course I believe in God," he snaps back. Faith, or lack of it, is not the issue. The question is: what manner of maker has led us to this point?
All performances here are exemplary, including stunning turns from the late, great Katrin Cartlidge who plays the desperate, self-medicated goth Sophie, and Lesley Sharp, Johnny's ex-girlfriend Louise and Naked's moral compass. In Johnny himself (a slice of Lydon, a shave of Lennon and a dose of Mark E Smith) director and actor would create a complex mix of the callous and compassionate, though rarely without a splenetic machine-gun wit: the survivor's apparatus. Only once will a comeback desert him, when "insecurity guard" Brian tells him: "Don't waste your life."
Thewlis had read the equivalent of a small bookshop to prepare for the part, and the ever-present dog-eared paperbacks in Johnny's satchel are like his theories; things to be picked up, appropriated or stolen, then put down. For the autodidact who expresses his sense of self though words, the permanent removal of those books will precipitate his breakdown.
That breakdown was "more or less real," Thewlis told this writer, years later. "That's how I felt - raging. The origin of it is where we experimented with him going inside himself. What I come out with at that point is fairly incoherent and ambiguous, and that's based on this day we had which we used to refer to as the 'Wobbly'. When we were filming the scene it was like 'Okay let's go there now'. I went to a bit of a strange place in my head. It was worth it."
Thewlis still receives plaudits for Johnny, and still receives work off the back of it. Steven Spielberg once requested an audience with him, after Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma spent a night arguing about the film.
"I get this quite a lot" he muses. "People either come up to me and say 'You changed my life', 'That was me', or 'You said everything that I've ever thought'. A few religious nuts in America wrote to me saying 'Remember, God loves you.'"
The film was borne out of Leigh's then preoccupations with the tension between spiritual and material values, some tougher aspects of the relationship between the sexes, and above all, a profound sense of impending, apocalyptic doom. 'Pre-Millennium Tension', Tricky called it in 1996, for an album steeped in paranoia, "psychic pollution" and regret. "Forever - what does that mean?" asks his lover. "It means we'll manage" Tricky grimly retorts. Manage. For Naked's damaged roster of characters, churning out their faded sexual rituals or wearily braced for more verbal and physical trauma, simply 'managing' would be a desirable state to attain.
As Leigh told 'Cineaste' in 1994, "In so far as Naked is about England, the fabric of society is collapsing. People are insecure, there is a sense of disintegration which is, as much as anything else, a legacy of the Tories." The previous decade's boom and bust had left almost every strata of society reeling, with a great many financially or emotionally ill-equipped for the subsequent recession, the period in which the film is set. It is hardly surprising that more people were admitted into psychiatric care during the 1980s than in any previous decade; subsequently released into communities which no longer existed or didn't care about them.
The Poll Tax levy, fleecing the poorest communities while propping up the richest, had also contributed to more numbers of homeless than ever. And Naked's original remit was to have focused on the street, until Leigh decided the subject was too one-dimensional. "Maggie!" bawls twitching Scots straggler Archie (Ewen Bremner) helplessly, in one of the film's subtler allusions. "She's gone, mate" mutters David Thewlis's Johnny, chief pallbearer of the post-Thatcherite malaise. "Those days are over."
However, Naked ought not to be taken chiefly as a state-of-the-nation polemic: the film working out of a broader European tradition of dark, existential allegory. Here, the homeless are those who have been disenfranchised from family, jobs, values - and us, for we can only guess at their stories, as they stumble like medieval cripples through a heightened, Dante-esquire vision of urban London.
The sole emblematic landmark to be glimpsed is the BT Tower looming high above the horizon: more unreachable communication. Appropriately, for a drama exploring rootlessness and displacement, the Naked City (shot in pitiless bleach-bypass to imbue the film with a grainy, Dickensian quality) has collapsed in on itself, having entered a black hole respecting no spatial perimeters. Johnny's sleepless odyssey through the capital's cafes, empty office blocks and bedroom floors will take him from Soho to Shoreditch in minutes.
Almost everybody in Naked is on the move, arriving or departing, to Andrew Dickson's driving, melancholy score. But rarely digging in, lending the film its picaresque quality - a latter-day pilgrim's progress through the Inferno. As befitting a film dealing with the end of days, mythical and Biblical references abound, from 'The Iliad' to the 'Book Of Revelation': Johnny's number of the Beast 'barcode' rant had been prompted by a pamphlet handed to the actor in the street, and its execution - an astonishing verbal juggling act in silhouette - would take around two dozen takes to perfect.
With his head framed against the halo-making rays of a Roman clock, Johnny is both broken Christ and testing devil, crying out to save souls, to reach somebody - anybody - while simultaneously flagellating them for their crucifying ennui. "Do you believe in God?" he's asked at one juncture. "Of course I believe in God," he snaps back. Faith, or lack of it, is not the issue. The question is: what manner of maker has led us to this point?
All performances here are exemplary, including stunning turns from the late, great Katrin Cartlidge who plays the desperate, self-medicated goth Sophie, and Lesley Sharp, Johnny's ex-girlfriend Louise and Naked's moral compass. In Johnny himself (a slice of Lydon, a shave of Lennon and a dose of Mark E Smith) director and actor would create a complex mix of the callous and compassionate, though rarely without a splenetic machine-gun wit: the survivor's apparatus. Only once will a comeback desert him, when "insecurity guard" Brian tells him: "Don't waste your life."
Thewlis had read the equivalent of a small bookshop to prepare for the part, and the ever-present dog-eared paperbacks in Johnny's satchel are like his theories; things to be picked up, appropriated or stolen, then put down. For the autodidact who expresses his sense of self though words, the permanent removal of those books will precipitate his breakdown.
That breakdown was "more or less real," Thewlis told this writer, years later. "That's how I felt - raging. The origin of it is where we experimented with him going inside himself. What I come out with at that point is fairly incoherent and ambiguous, and that's based on this day we had which we used to refer to as the 'Wobbly'. When we were filming the scene it was like 'Okay let's go there now'. I went to a bit of a strange place in my head. It was worth it."
Thewlis still receives plaudits for Johnny, and still receives work off the back of it. Steven Spielberg once requested an audience with him, after Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma spent a night arguing about the film.
"I get this quite a lot" he muses. "People either come up to me and say 'You changed my life', 'That was me', or 'You said everything that I've ever thought'. A few religious nuts in America wrote to me saying 'Remember, God loves you.'"