The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mike Leigh · a film · 1993 · written and directed by Mike Leigh · the film as released, about 131 minutes
Mode
Night picaresque on the ground of British social realism, made by rehearsal and improvisation; a portrait of one consciousness, with farce and melodrama at the edges
Mythos
The wanderer cast out and marked, the street prophet of the end of things, the fallen intellectual; a descent through a night city whose shades each tell a part of their lives
Phase
From a handheld alley in Manchester to a flat in London, two nights and days of wandering, a return, an intrusion, and a departure down the middle of a road
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 131 minutes, in English, in Mancunian, London and Scottish speech; written and directed by Mike Leigh from long rehearsal with the cast
Register
Talk that runs ahead of the man who speaks it, cold desaturated night, dread and an exhausted lyricism, with broad comedy and caricature in the domestic scenes
Scale
One man and two nights; the city’s solitaries, sex and violence between men and women, class from the unemployed to the property owner, and the end of the millennium as a public mood
Governing Proposition
A self-taught, unemployed man with a quick and brilliant tongue comes down from Manchester to a flat in London, has sex with one of the women who live there, and walks out into two nights of the city, meeting strangers and taking from each what he can use. The film holds that his intelligence is real thought and also a weapon, and will not let the brilliance excuse the cruelty or the cruelty cancel the brilliance; around him it shows a city of people alone, talking past one another.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in an alley in Manchester, handheld, at night. A man sexually assaults a woman there, steals a car, and the film cuts to London. Nothing in what follows explains it. The man is Johnny, played by David Thewlis, and the first sight of him is an act he never accounts for. The prologue stands apart from the rest of the film in its camera and its place, and that separation is its function: whatever Johnny says later about the world, the film has already shown what he did before he said any of it.
Naked was written and directed by Mike Leigh, the script made through his method of long rehearsal and improvisation with the cast, and produced by Simon Channing Williams for Thin Man Films with Channel Four money. Dick Pope photographed it, Jon Gregory cut it, Andrew Dickson wrote the score and Alison Chitty designed it. It runs about 131 minutes, in colour, in English, in Mancunian, London and Scottish speech. It premiered in competition at Cannes in May 1993, where Leigh won Best Director and Thewlis Best Actor, and was released in Britain later that year. One version is in circulation, and this page judges the film as released.
The inheritance is British social realism, and Leigh’s own comedies of manners in the family and the street, built from improvisation. The turn is large. The same method is carried here into a night picaresque, into metaphysical talk and sexual violence, and into an anti-hero whom the audience is made to find brilliant, attractive and repellent at once, with no social diagnosis to rest in. The stake was real: Leigh’s audience and critics expected the warm, observant comedy of his earlier films, and the film risked being read as cruel to women and as endorsing its hero, as a strand of its reception read it. It refused the pattern of the British film of its years, which pointed to causes and settled its heroes. The swerve is made from within a strong tradition, by that tradition’s own methods, and in a form, the picaresque, that is old.
Movement II
Johnny arrives at the London flat of Louise, played by Lesley Sharp, the woman who will at the end offer him a life with her. He has sex with her flatmate Sophie, played by Katrin Cartlidge, and then leaves for the night. In a few scenes the film has set the pattern of what follows: a man who can take from a person and cannot stay with one.
What the film discloses can be stated. Johnny is articulate and self-taught, unemployed in the Britain of the early nineties, and his intelligence has nowhere to go but into contempt, which falls hardest on women and on anyone weaker. His talk of the Book of Revelation, of barcodes, of the end of the species, is real thought, and it is also a weapon; the film shows both and lets neither cancel the other. It does not let the brilliance excuse the cruelty, and it does not let the cruelty dismiss the brilliance. Thewlis plays it from months of rehearsal, and the long speeches have the rhythm of thought rather than of a writer’s lines, which is how the method becomes the knowledge.
The disclosure has a limit, and the limit is in this flat. Louise and Sophie are seen chiefly as what Johnny does to them. Sharp and Cartlidge are as exact as Thewlis, and the film shows Sophie’s degradation at its cost, but its knowledge of their lives stops short of its knowledge of his. The film knows one consciousness from inside and the people around it from outside, and the women, who bear most of what he does, are the ones it knows least.
Movement III
Johnny walks out into the city, and for two nights and the days between them the film becomes a chain of single encounters. A Scottish pair, Archie and Maggie, played by Ewen Bremner and Susan Vidler, call for each other in the dark. A waitress in a café cannot answer him. Each encounter is one more face of the same thing: Johnny meets a person, takes from them what he can use, and ends it. The episodic chain is the film’s form and its knowledge at once, for a man who can attach to no one can be shown only as a series of meetings he ends, and a plotted drama would have to give him the cause or the arc the film denies.
Brian, played by Peter Wight, is a night watchman guarding an empty office building. He talks about his cottage and his future; Johnny mocks him through the glass, then talks with him about the end of the world in the empty, lit space. It is the clearest statement of the film’s law. One man is paid to guard nothing and plans a life; the other has no work and talks of the last days; neither reaches the other. The scene reaches a desolate grandeur, and it holds the film’s sense of labour as absence: the job is a vigil over space no one uses, in a city of office blocks standing empty.
Dick Pope’s photography makes the night city cold and desaturated, blue and grey, without glamour. The long tracking walks run under Dickson’s ostinato for harp and strings, used sparingly and chiefly under walking, and they give the episodic form a pulse like doom. Johnny is the wanderer cast out and marked, a Cain who cannot settle; the street prophet of the apocalypse; the fallen intellectual descending through a night city whose shades each tell him a part of their lives. The structure carries the archetype, and the film keeps it at arm’s length: Johnny’s Revelation is one more of his performances, and the realism around him does not let the myth stand unquestioned.
Movement IV
A woman in a window asks Johnny into her house, drinking alone. The visit turns from invitation into dread: the house, and the sudden sight of her emptied life, become terror and pity at once. It is the last and fullest of the night encounters, and the chain has thickened as it went, from the Scottish pair in the dark to the watchman’s empty building to this house. Run the subtractive test on the wandering and it mostly resists, because each meeting is another face of the one thing and the order climbs.
Back at the flat the film changes its law. Jeremy, played by Greg Cruttwell, the landlord, who calls himself Sebastian, intrudes on the flat, assaults Sophie and later Louise. He is there to show a cruelty without Johnny’s intelligence, the rich man’s version beside the poor one, the dull double doing the same harm. The contrast has a function, and it is made at length and made again; the film would lose little by losing half of it. Cruttwell plays him at caricature, a type of the late eighties property boom that has dated more than Johnny has. The strand runs as melodrama, a villain who arrives, does harm and leaves, drawn in thicker lines than anything in the night, and the film’s realism does not hold him.
Then Sandra, played by Claire Skinner, comes home from a holiday to find strangers in her flat, and the film turns to farce, in bandages and outrage and broken sentences. One law reaches even this in part: everyone in the film is alone and talks past everyone else, and Sandra’s sentences that never finish are the comic version of that failure. But the domestic act is staged more conventionally than the night, with entrances, a villain and a crisis, and it could take another shape with less loss. This is the half of the film that matters least, and it is where the film is least in command of its tone, and longest: 131 minutes are many for a picaresque whose law is repetition.
Movement V
Johnny, beaten by strangers in the street, comes back to the flat and is nursed. Louise offers him a future with her. He leaves alone, limping down the middle of a road toward the camera, under Dickson’s harp. The film began with a departure he never explained and ends with one he chooses, and the flat that took him in at the start is left at the close. The wandering out and the failed return complete the archetype: the wanderer goes on. The last image is a strong note, and not a transport.
Thirty-three years have not settled the film’s question: whether it understands its hero’s misogyny or shares in it, and whether his cosmology is wisdom, cant or both. The argument has continued in criticism and in teaching, because the film gives evidence to both sides: the assault in the prologue is shown and never excused, Sophie’s degradation is shown at its cost, the end leaves him alone and lame, and still he is allowed his brilliance. The film survives whole in its one version, screened in revival and repertory, issued on home video in a prestige collection and taught, though its presence is steady rather than wide, and its empty office blocks and its landlord belong to their year. Its reach is real and specific: the two prizes at Cannes, the career of Thewlis and the standing of Cartlidge, and one type, the talking, wrecked male anti-hero of the British street, fixed in one performance.
The neighbours mark the place. Short Cuts (8.2), Robert Altman’s film of the same year, also tells a city of solitaries in loose episodes; Naked rises higher and goes deeper into myth, and is less even in its form, its making and its law. Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (8.5) walks an articulate outcast through a capital, and Notes from Underground (8.9) founded the clever, spiteful man whose intelligence turns on the weak; the film inherits that type and does not found it. Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (7.7) carried his reach further abroad. What holds Naked below Tier IV is plain: the landlord’s strand and the domestic farce, which weaken its necessity, its coherence and its command of tone; a disclosure that knows the women less than the man; and a reach real but narrow. Within that it is a film of one consciousness made audible, walking a cold city to the end of its own talk.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test on the wandering and it mostly resists. Each night encounter is one more face of the same thing, Johnny meeting a person and taking from them what he can use, and the chain thickens as it goes, from a Scottish pair calling for each other in the dark to a watchman’s empty building to a woman in a window. What fails the test is the landlord’s strand: two assaults made to show a cruelty without Johnny’s intelligence, a rich man’s version for contrast, made at length and made again. The film loses little by losing half of it. Sandra’s return, in farce, is permitted more than compelled, and 131 minutes are long for a picaresque whose law is repetition. Above the gate, not by much.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: an articulate, self-taught, unemployed man in the Britain of the early nineties whose intelligence has nowhere to go but into contempt, and whose contempt falls hardest on women and on anyone weaker. His talk of the Book of Revelation, barcodes and the end of the species is shown as real thought and as a weapon at once. Around him the film discloses a city of the solitary: the watchman guarding empty space, the woman who drinks alone and asks him in, the waitress who cannot answer him. That is a condition, not a mood. What holds the figure below the gate is the second disclosure: Louise and Sophie are seen chiefly as what he does to them, and the film knows their lives less than his.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is dread and a cold, exhausted lyricism, and it recurs. Brian’s building at night, the watchman talking of his cottage and his future while Johnny mocks him through the glass, reaches a desolate grandeur. The woman in the window, her house and the sudden sight of her emptied life turn into terror and pity at once. The long tracking walks under Andrew Dickson’s harp and strings give the city a pulse like doom, and David Thewlis’s monologues lift when the thought runs ahead of the man. The farce of Sandra’s return and the landlord’s scenes lower the frequency, and the last image, the limp down the road toward the camera, is a strong note but not a transport. Height is reached several times and not sustained.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The patterns are there and partly built. Johnny is the wanderer cast out and marked, a Cain who cannot settle; he is the street prophet of the apocalypse and the fallen intellectual; and the descent through the night city is a journey through an underworld whose shades each tell him a part of their lives. The structure carries it: a wandering out and a return that fails, ending with the wanderer going on, so the archetype bears load rather than standing as allusion. What holds the figure is that the film distrusts the myth it builds. Johnny’s talk of Revelation is shown as one more performance, and the realism keeps the archetype at arm’s length. Myth built and then doubted is honest, and it is not the top of the axis.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is British social realism, and Leigh’s own comedies of manners in the family and the street, made by improvisation. The turn is large: the same method carried into a night picaresque, metaphysical talk, sexual violence and an anti-hero whom the audience is made to find brilliant, attractive and repellent at once, with no social diagnosis to rest in. The stake was real. Leigh’s audience and critics expected the warm, observant comedy of his earlier films, and the film risked being read as cruel to women and as endorsing its hero, as a strand of its reception read it. It also left the pattern of the British film of its period, with no moral settlement and no redemptive arc. Held below the gate: the swerve is made within a strong tradition by its own methods, and the picaresque is old.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The episodic chain is the knowledge: a man who can attach to no one is shown as a series of encounters, each ended by him, and a plotted drama would have to give him a cause or an arc the film denies. The rehearsed and improvised method yields speech that is the character’s thought rather than a writer’s, and that speech is the disclosure itself. The handheld prologue, cut off from all that follows, makes the first sight of Johnny an act he never accounts for. Against it, the domestic strand at the flat runs on a more conventional dramatic form, with entrances, a villain and a crisis, and that half of the film could take another shape with less loss.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Thirty-three years of return have not settled the film’s central question: whether it understands its hero’s misogyny or shares in it, and whether Johnny’s cosmology is wisdom, cant or both. The argument has continued in criticism and in teaching, and the film keeps feeding it because it gives evidence to both sides. Formally it repays a second viewing: the pairing of Johnny and the landlord, the bright poor man and the dull rich one doing the same harm; the prologue and the ending, two departures; the flat entered at the start and left at the close. The monologues bear return. What holds the figure is the kind of yield: the evidence is of a sustained critical debate more than of a depth that does not run out.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and narrow: the film showed that a director of observant social comedy could make a work of real darkness by the same method, and it fixed a type, the articulate, wrecked, talking male anti-hero of the British street, in one performance. It did not reorganise what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes in 1993; the making of Thewlis’s career and the standing of Katrin Cartlidge; a lasting place among Leigh’s films, though the film that most extended his reach abroad came three years later. A place in the line of British realism is general rather than traceable to this film, and no line of films can be named that descends from it as a debt.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives in its one version as released. Presence has been continuous but not of the widest kind: revival and repertory screenings, home video in a prestige collection, teaching in British cinema and in courses on its director, and a steady critical standing. Two charges hold the figure under the gate. Presence is narrower than that of the films that reach it at this span; and the surface is partly fixed to its moment. The empty office blocks and the landlord who owns the flat belong to the London of the late eighties property boom, and the landlord is played as a type of that year, which has dated more than Johnny has.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Command of the medium is strong, and in places it bears the film. Thewlis’s performance, built over months of rehearsal, holds long speeches that have the rhythm of thought; Cartlidge, Lesley Sharp and Peter Wight are as exact. Dick Pope’s photography makes London cold, desaturated and nocturnal, without glamour, and the long tracking walks with Dickson’s score give the episodic form its pulse. Jon Gregory’s cutting lets scenes run until they turn. The fault is in the control of tone: Greg Cruttwell’s landlord is pitched at caricature, the Sandra scenes slide into broad comedy, and the domestic act is staged more conventionally than the night. The making is skilled throughout and uneven in the half of the film that matters least.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Johnny talking with Brian about the end of the world in an empty lit building at night, and Sandra coming home from a holiday to find strangers in her flat, in a farce of bandages and outrage. One law reaches both in part: everyone in the film is alone and talks past everyone else, and Sandra’s broken sentences are a comic version of the same failure of address. The landlord’s strand obeys a different law, a melodrama of a villain who arrives, does harm and leaves, drawn in thicker lines than the rest, and the realism does not hold him. That holds the figure: a wide range, from the apocalypse to farce, held by a real but strained coherence.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The orders held are several: one consciousness, given in its own words at length; sex and violence between men and women; class and the city, from the unemployed to the property owner; labour, as its absence and as the watchman’s empty job; the end of the millennium as a public mood; and the sacred, in Johnny’s theology of the apocalypse. They are joined in Johnny’s talk and his walking, not listed. What holds the figure lowest on the page is what lies outside him: the family is almost absent, the state appears only as empty buildings and the street, and history is a mood rather than a structure. For a film of one man and two nights the reach is wide, and short of the films that hold a society.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.2. A film whole in its one version and present for thirty-three years in revival, home video and teaching; the disclosure of an intelligence with nowhere to go but into contempt, shown as thought and as weapon at once; and a performance built in rehearsal, with Pope’s cold night city and the tracking walks under Dickson’s score.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: consciousness, sex and violence, class, labour as absence, the millennial mood and an apocalyptic theology joined in one man, with the family almost absent, the state only as empty buildings and the street, and history a mood. Above it, The Inevitable, Pressure on Tradition and The Inner Law at 7.6: the landlord’s strand made twice and the farce of Sandra’s return, a reach real and narrow, and a melodrama the film’s realism does not hold.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.1, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, from a sum of 94.5, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a judgment from knowledge of Naked as released in 1993, the one version in circulation, about 131 minutes, in colour and in English, from the alley in Manchester to the road at the end: written and directed by Mike Leigh, the script made through long rehearsal and improvisation with the cast; produced by Simon Channing Williams for Thin Man Films with Channel Four money; photographed by Dick Pope, edited by Jon Gregory, with music by Andrew Dickson and production design by Alison Chitty; with David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Greg Cruttwell, Claire Skinner, Peter Wight, Ewen Bremner and Susan Vidler. Premiered in competition at Cannes in May 1993. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted, and no dialogue is quoted. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the month of the British release, other sources of finance, the district of London in which the flat stands, the names of the players in single episodes, the photographic process used for the film’s colour, the extent of restorations, the exact order of the night encounters and the number of scenes.