13 - Desperate Lives: Naked

Summary

“They give birth outside a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”

–Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

From its opening scene, Naked is the most volatile, visionary, and kinetic work in Leigh's oeuvre. It begins with a lurching tracking shot along a grim Manchester night alley, where we see in a blur the film's protagonist, Johnny, raping a woman he obviously knows under a street lamp. In the scene that follows, Johnny steals a car, and Leigh has the camera go along on the night ride down almost empty highways to London. The camera work is much more visceral than Leigh's normal style, but it is perfectly apt for what ensues in Naked – a more darkly violent film than any of his previous work. Centering around solitary, marginal characters, Naked is utterly removed from the messy, conflicted, sometimes caring family relations and domestic life upon which most of Leigh's work focuses.

Naked centers around Johnny, the most eloquent character yet to appear in a Leigh film, and follows his aimless meandering for fortyeight hours around London. Johnny is a working-class drifter and Dostoevskian-style intellectual – a social outsider like Cyril, the motorcycle messenger hero of High Hopes, but intellectually sharper and lacking the moral and psychological comfort of a political ideology or the sweetness visible beneath Cyril's quiet anger and class resentment. In fact, Johnny is a man whose capacity for anger and cruelty are the strongest elements in his personality.