Product Description

One of the essential films of the 1990s, Mike Leigh's brilliant and controversial "Naked" stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming, eloquent, and relentlessly vicious drifter in London. Rejecting all those who would care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of the desperate and the dispossessed and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances by Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharp, Leigh's panorama of England's crumbling underbelly is a showcase of black comedy and doomsday prophecy, and was the winner of the best director and actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20003 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-09-20
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 131 minutes

Amazon.com
In between his breakthrough film (Life Is Sweet) and his world sensation (Secrets and Lies), filmmaker Mike Leigh created his most abrasive and daring film, Naked. This "Angry Young Man" for the 1990s follows an acidic wanderer (Cannes award winner David Thewlis) who observes a corrosive Britain. An intellectual, bitter film filtered with debauchery and black humor, Naked follows the bemusing Johnny as he crosses in and out of doorways, drifting into old acquaintances and new lost souls. It is more of a character film than sheer entertainment and thus it can be hard to watch, but it offers one of the great performances of the 1990s. Thewlis would have been an Oscar shoo-in if he'd worn a tuxedo and repressed his emotions. He didn't, and his brilliant work went unrecognized in mainstream America. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
A pitch-black comedy, written and directed by Mike Leigh, in which the unstoppable Johnny (David Thewlis) comes to London and makes life difficult for everyone he meets: new girlfriends, old girlfriends, a drunken Scotsman on the street. The smell of misanthropy, which wafts from one Leigh picture to the next, hangs more heavily than ever in the air, and the movie is badly unbalanced by the presence of a token yuppie-not a character at all, just a lazy exercise in caricature. But Thewlis saves the day: the Johnny he creates is lean and hungry, foulmouthed but erudite, his low expectations crossed with high spirits. He's one of the most compelling rebels in modern cinema. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

You will be in for a "shell-shock" of a ride.
"What's it like being you?"- A classic line if ever there was one.

You have probably never seen a movie quite like Naked. It begins with a random rape scene and it ends..., well let's just say it doesn't so much end, as the movie finishes.

Naked gives you a tour of the dark underbelly of London as seen through the eyes of Johnny, an anti-hero if there ever was one. An intellectual who is on the run from.., life? the law? his own demons? You can't really say.

The dialogue is fascinating, the scenes bleak as you view the desolation and wasteland of both London and the characters lives.

It all takes place over the course of a day or two, and when I was finished watching it, I sat with my mouth agape for several minutes as my brain continued to process what I had just seen.

Kudos to Mike Leigh for making a film where the characters truly dominate, and where you really, really, really need to pay attention to understand what appears to be going on.

Highly Recommended.

a brilliant film
this is definitely my favorite mike leigh movie of all. david thewlis is brilliant as the misanthropic main character and his wanderings through the city at night and myriad quotable diatribes are engaging and really draw you into the story. the people he meets along the way are engaging and unique. it's definitely not for those who want to watch the typical hollywood fare with happy endings and blindly optimistic main characters. it is a very thought provoking movie with interesting characters and i would recommend seeing it even if you are not familiar with the other films of leigh.

Leigh veered off into thief, wife, lover, cook country and shouldna have
This is an unfortunate film, actually. Although, mostly interesting it begins to grate upon one midway through. Mike Leigh's strengths are his ability to demonstrate the 'lives' of working class britons with heaps of wit, charm, cleverness and bits of rather heavy-handed (tho not quite sappy) emotionalism. He's best when he keeps it light overall whilst making one or two quite heavy points. The problem with Naked is that it is all about heavy with very little light. In addition, Mr. Leigh tries but fails to lade his tale with deep metaphorical meaning in the way that the rather hideously bad film The Thief, Cook, Wife and Lover did although without the fantasmagorical posturing, pretension, piffle and puck. In a nutshell this is the tale of a working class Mancunian who is either insane or being driven insane by the workings of his mind. His problem is that he is too smart for his class (that's breeding, mind), which shows in his glib verbosity and abstruse philosophical riffs which he bundles up in clever entendre and verbal puns. The problem is that he is speaking university to working class yobs and yobettes which causes him to be alienating and alienated to those he interacts with, rather assaults. His failure, or inability to connect on a purely personal, human level further damaging his diseased mind which causes him to act out more and so on. Mr. Leigh attempted to stir in a few different ingredients into his metaphorical stew but he fails to, for instance, demonstrate that the working class protagonist's angry, abusive manner is equivalent to the posh anti-heroe's equally angry abusive behaviour with the difference being only that one can afford to 'pay' for his rapine behaviour while the other must merely take his rapes for free. I'm uncertain why Mr. Leigh brought that psycho-social angle into the story because he had enough semi-meaningless flux to deal with in the story as it is. There are other random bits of disconnectedness that I shan't bother to comment upon. To sum up, this is an interesting but unentertaining, non-thought-provoking movie that is worth watching if you are a big fan of Leigh's movies.