David Thewlis’s lost soul, raging around
London in Mike Leigh’s fiercely bleak masterwork, is even more disturbing 28 years on
“Have you got a goblet or something? Because my heart’s bleeding.” This film was the receptacle for some of the most sulphurous outpourings of fear and rage and non-compassion in Mike Leigh’s career, and gave us a great monster of
British cinema: the insufferable lippy wideboy and pseudo-intellectual Johnny, a character roiling internally with despair, with whom David Thewlis made his horribly watchable breakthrough in a 132-minute guitar-solo of a performance.
Naked’s rerelease after nearly 30 years gives us the perspective to ask the question: is Johnny a rapist? Is he supposed to be a rapist? And what of the other young male character – a borderline-psychopathic posh yuppie who is apparently Johnny’s ex-girlfriend’s landlord? He appears to be a rapist too, or at least, like Johnny, a fan of rough sex in which consent is a grey area.