Naken

In the rough London of today, far from the fashionable areas, lives the ultimate antihero of the 90's - Johnny. Cold, cynical and immoral but also emotional and passionate inbetween times. Johnny is trying to get along in life, among the bizarre, repulsive specimen at the fringe of society.

COMMENTARY
''In London a rat is never more than ten feet away''. This is not a crucial line in Mike Leigh's film, but it does say something about the movie. Naked, set in London, is about people at the bottom of the social scale. Dirty, repulsive people who are literally crawling along the walls, limping through the alleyways and who are despised as much by themselves as their surroundings.
Mike Leigh has called his way of making movies ''heightened realism''. He never uses a written manuscript but controlled improvisations by his actors instead. During several weeks of directed improvisations, when characters and plot develop, Leigh takes notes. Then he presents a written text, not a manuscript, which is used when shooting.
Parallels could be drawn to John Cassavetes' way of making films, but Mike Leigh takes an interest in an entirely different environment. You may be able to feel sympathy for the characters in a Cassavetes movie, but after spending two hours with the characters in Naked, you only feel relief
when you think of the fact that you are never going to see them again.
With Naked, the 50-year-old Mike Leigh, whose earlier films have been payed tribute to by everyone from the Venice film festival to Brett Anderson in Suede, has made a movie which is lil(e a dirty finger with a festering nail which mercilessly tries to mark and injure the eyes of the audience. Leigh works with an unsophisticated but exact visual language which, just as the term ''heightened realism'' implies, shows us reality in a heightened, explained and plain state.
David Twewlis, familiar from Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet and Louis Malle's Damage, is totally believable as the chilly, ultra-cynical Johnny. The whole film depends on him. Not as in standing and falling, but as in standing and walking, or, as in the closing scenes, limping with excruciating pain. ':'
Jan Gradvall

Orig. titel
Naked: Medverkande
David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp: Producent
Simon Channing-Williams: Manus
Mike Leigh: Foto
Dick Pope: Musik
Andrew Dickson: Talat språk
English