BFI’s new edition delivers some great supplementary material along with a far cleaner and sharper looking presentation in comparison to Criterion’s 10-year-old edition. I imagined Johnny’s conspiracy theory babbling about barcodes, the Book of Revelations, and millennial apocalypse would now resemble the paranoid fantasies of Q-anoners. But, his proclivity for seeing the end of the world in human behaviour seems more relevant in this age of climate change and the lip service paid to minimising it. Leigh says Johnny, “isn’t a victim of conspiracy theoriyitis. He enjoys talking about this stuff but it’s banter and letting off steam.” For me this is at odds with Thewlis’ conviction when delivering those monologues.

The central character in "Naked" is Johnny ( David Thewlis), who as the movie opens has rough sex with a weeping girl in an alley in some barren northern city, and then steals a car and drives down to London. From the way he talks and certain things he refers to, we gradually conclude that he has had an education - is an "intellectual," in that his opinions are mostly formed from words, not feelings.

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Ben Myers, in a Guardian article calling Naked Mike Leigh's "finest work" and "the best British film in recent history", elaborated on the many theories filmgoers have had on who Johnny might represent: "a modern, albeit highly flawed, Jesus attempting to change people's lives. Or perhaps he's the devil himself. Others have suggested it is a post-AIDS morality movie, or a classic urban existentialist tale." [6] And Johnny is a predator, an abuser whose evident anguish and self-hate does not entitle him to a moment of our pity. He is at the centre of a fiercely pessimistic story that is not leavened, as many of Leigh’s films are, with redeeming features. This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.

Derek Malcolm of The Guardian noted that the film "is certainly Leigh's most striking piece of cinema to date" and that "it tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist." Of Johnny, he writes: "He likes no one, least of all himself, and he dislikes women even more than men, relapsing into sexual violence as his misogyny takes hold. He is perhaps redeemable, but only just. And not by any woman in our immediate view." He praised the directing and performances, singling out Thewlis, writing that he "plays [Johnny] with a baleful brilliance that is certain to make this underrated, but consistently striking, actor into a star name ... [Johnny] is, at his worst, a cold, desperate fish. His redeeming feature is that he still cares." [9] In his waking hours, the only thing that ever shuts him up is when he reads and fortunately, he does like to read. Johnny’s an auto-didact, razor sharp but from a generation where clever working-class teenagers weren’t always encouraged to go to university – his fellow Mancs Morrissey and Mark E. Smith spring to mind here. Come to think of it, Johnny’s nasal twang and some of his scalding wit do remind me of the much missed Mark E. All of these stylistic choices are right for "Naked," and so is the title, which describes characters who exist in the world without the usual layers of protection. They are clothed, but not warmly or cheerfully. But they are naked of families, relationships, homes, values and, in most cases, jobs. They exist in modern Britain with few possessions except their words.Leigh first had the idea for the story while a student in Manchester in the early 1960s: "We had a very enlightened teacher who endlessly reminded us that the next total eclipse would be in August 1999. Later I started thinking about the millennium and the end of the world. In 1992 the millennium was impending, so I brought that idea to the film." [2] BFI then closes the disc off with a new trailer advertising its restoration, along with a self-playing image gallery featuring production photos and posters from a handful of countries. BFI also includes a booklet featuring an essay by Caitlin Quinlan on the film’s structure, its toxic male characters, and how the film handles the two lead women in the film. This essay is then followed by an essay by Lou Thomas on how Leigh has presented London in his films. Notes around the disc’s supplements, written by Vic Pratt, close it off. Mr. Mason is a pretty young principal of a thriving private high school. The dude is in his late 30s and has had a pretty smooth ride up until a few weeks ago. He used to love going to his job and monitoring the success of his perfect high-society students. However, the girls in one of his classes are growing restless in their final year of school. These 18+ teens are having none of the discipline they were used to just one year ago. It’s all about showing off, making TikTok videos, and being sexually provocative. Mr. Mason is a young principal, and this is the first time Nor do matters improve with the arrival of Sandra ( Claire Skinner), whose name is on the lease. She has a job, apparently thinks of herself as being normal and productive, and offers free advice and criticism, but the film invites us to see how precariously close she is to falling into the same abyss as her friends. Myers, Ben. "Is Naked Britain's most under-rated film?," The Guardian. 20 February 2008. Retrieved on 16 February 2017.

Leigh has said in an interview that while his earlier films (including " High Hopes" and " Life Is Sweet") might have embodied a socialist view of the world, this one edges over into anarchy. I agree. It suggests a world in which the operating systems have become distant from such inhabitants as Johnny and the women in the flat.

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Since putting his schooldays behind him, Johnny’s only known Conservative rule. It’s 1993 and the countdown to 2000 has started with millennial anxiety on the rise – anybody else remember the Y2K scare? Homelessness is rife on the streets of Britain’s big cities, and unemployment is hovering around the 3 million mark with economists predicting it might soon rise by another half a million. So, is the film the working out of an idea of violence? It isn’t. The violence is an organic function of the characters. On the basis that people behave in all sorts of ways in private, and are vulnerable or susceptible to their own impulses in different situations.” There have been many fine performances in Mike Leigh films over the years; Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake and Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner for starters. I’ll even happily admit that James Corden was pretty damn good in All or Nothing. But best of all is David Thewlis as the in-yer-face Johnny in Naked.

a b c d e f g Coveney, Michael (1996). The World According to Mike Leigh, pp.19, 21, 25, 27, 29, 32-34, 65-67. HarperCollins, New York. ISBN 0006383394. Perhaps surprisingly, he does later manage to scrape up some pity for Archie’s girlfriend Maggie’s plight and even buys her some food. Ironically, she unintentionally supplies one of the cruellest moments in the film when he she guesses his age as forty and doesn’t remotely believe him when he reveals he’s twenty-seven. In the early 1990s, “problematic” was a term seldom heard. Almost three decades on, this seems like the film for which the word was invented. Jeremy rapes two women, and is unmistakably a villainous piece of well-groomed male rage. Johnny’s taste for rough sex is what will have audiences squirming at exactly how much consent is occurring during his surprisingly frequent couplings.

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This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel. In a Manchester alley, Johnny rapes a woman. When her family arrive and chase him away, he steals a car and flees to Dalston, a "scrawny, unpretentious area" in east London. He seeks refuge at the home of Louise, a former girlfriend from Manchester, who is not happy to see him. Louise works as a file clerk and lives with two flatmates, the unemployed Sophie, whom she calls her "hippy-dippy friend", and the primary tenant Sandra, a nurse who is away in Zimbabwe. Plus, Johnny is an emotional vampire. He cannot bring himself to be close to people, but feeds off their energy, leaving most encounters invigorated while the other party is drained. Note how often the character, vampire like, waits to be invited into someone’s home or workplace. Equal in those he showers with rapid-fire insults and bile, elements of Thewlis’ performance suggest his character is suffering PTSD from an unnamed trauma. But women unquestionably bear the brunt of Johnny’s cruelty as much as Jeremy’s. With his snark and point-scoring contrariness, Johnny would definitely be blogging and podcasting nowadays, shifting political leanings if one opinion became too fashionable. Jeremy would have found fellow travellers in the misogyny and violent porn that exploded online when highspeed broadband became the norm.