Naked

Naked is the bleakest of Mike Leigh's portraits of contemporary life that I have come across. For that very reason I was put off seeing the film in the cinema. The milieu in Naked is certainly raw and brutal, but humour is also a central element in Leigh's films. You can laugh through the tears. This diametrical opposition between the brutal and the comic is personified by Johnny, who flees a promised beating in Manchester to an ex-girlfriend's flat in London. The ex-girlfriend Louise reluctantly puts up with Johnny settling in – and with his immediately getting involved with her friend Sophie, who also lives in the flat.

Johnny is a down-at-heel benefits claimant, a stupid and violent sod for much of the way, but he also has qualities that make you wonder how on earth he could have ended up at the bottom of society. For example, Johnny is incredibly well read and can quote classic works non-stop. Despite his ravaged face he still has his charm intact, to which Sophie falls victim. So, in part, do we as viewers.

Johnny is the film's central character, but besides him we meet several other odd and pitiful existences living on the shady side of life. They turn up during Johnny's nocturnal wanderings in London.

Naked has become a little too long. As far as I am concerned, Leigh could well have left out the sequences with the mysterious, perverted Jeremy, who is a wealthy sod where Johnny is a poor one. Jeremy eventually gets a role in the plot, but he is dispensable because he resembles Johnny so much.