_Naked_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs _Naked_ is a hard movie. It's nasty and harsh, often extremely funny, and occasionally terrible to watch. It's uneven and inspired. Like other movies by British writer- director Mike Leigh - for example, _Life Is Sweet_, _High Hopes_, _Meantime_ - it's a close look at class conflict, sexual insecurities, and identity anxieties in working class England. It is hard, and messy and imperfect too, but it is also compelling and (mostly) smart. The film is driven, pretty much at full throttle, by its central character, Johnny (played with moments of genius by David Thewlis). He's a drifter, reckless and mean: the first image we see is created by a hand-held camera raggedly approaching what appears to be Johnny's rape of a woman in an alley. She screams and pulls away: he runs off, steals a car, and drives from Manchester to London while the credits roll, under threateningly monotonous theme music. Johnny's sudden, brazen appearance at an ex-girlfriend's apartment leads to escalating chaos, a series of violent and disturbing intersections between characters. That these intersections seem random *and* vaguely associated with Johnny is part of the film's play with cause-and-effect. What makes him unnerving is that he acts out of such a grim lack of explicit malice or motivation: that there's no particular reason for his abuse of the ex- girlfriend, Louise (Lesley Sharp), or her roommate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge) appears to fly in the face of the rules of "character development.'' But there's something else at work here. Johnny seems pathetic, yes, and pathological, wracked with an anger he takes out on convenient, unexceptional targets. When, upon his arrival, Louise asks, "How did you get here?'', he runs through the big bang theory, from initial explosion to amphibians to apes. Exasperated, she recognizes that nothing has changed since she last saw him when they both lived in Manchester. And yet he is seductive to a variety of people, from a nighttime security guard who lets him in out of the cold (Johnny asks what he's guarding in "this postmodernist gas chamber''; the paunchy divorcee answers simply, "space'') to Sophie, who is tentatively thrilled and then afraid when their sex gets rough. Preying on lonely people, afflicted with time and emptiness, Johnny is the loudest and most abrasive sufferer of all. His elaborately performed meanness affords the film its moments of acute, even dire, comedy; these are somewhat unnerving in themselves, since what's funny always has to do with his abuses of other people, for instance, a homeless Scotsman with a weird head-twitch and absolutely no sense of irony. _Naked_ is at its least effective in the character of Jeremy (also known as Sebastian Hawkes), the women's landlord, played by Greg Crutwell. He's introduced as a kind of awkward foil to Johnny, a monied, less witty version of cruel boorishness. For Leigh, the upper class has consistently been the butt of bitter, often cumbersome humor: Jeremy serves the same polemical purpose. At first the cuts to him disparaging his date at a restaurant or elsewhere are just distracting; they interrupt the energy that Johnny's (lack of) story is accumulating. But eventually Jeremy becomes overwhelming; he invades Louise and Sophie's apartment, claiming that he's a friend of their absent roommate, Sandra (Claire Skinner). His brutal rape of Sophie (the movie's most consistently self-positioned victim) makes Johnny's previous viciousness look almost benign, especially as it's crosscut with his being thrown out of yet another woman's home (and *her* tearful rage becomes yet another point of comparison to Johnny: she's painfully inarticulate in the face of his ongoing vile chatter). Jeremy is slithery like a lizard and he doesn't quite fit here, except that his appearances make you wish that Johnny would show up on screen again: during the film's last third Jeremy strolls about the women's apartment in his black bikini underwear, threatening to smash them up against walls for no reason at all. Johnny, meanwhile, is beaten by a squad of street punks; his return to the apartment, bloody and bruised, exhibits *his* victimization, a stretch, given his behavior and lack of repentance, but useful for the film's suggestion that victimhood is an arbitrary, unchosen, always-miserable condition. Johnny remains brutal, of course, but next to Jeremy, he's becoming near-sympathetic. And that's an alarming in itself, and makes you think again about how you align yourself with movie-characters. Aside from this structural heavy-handedness - the comparison of evils - the film makes another, more complicated point about social injustice and the way it becomes gendered (it's worse to be weak, to be a "woman''). Johnny embodies and acts out multiple frustrations and emotional batterings. It's probably not surprising that his wrath takes an exceedingly misogynistic form; what's less necessary for the film's point is the way that the women characters are all unspeakably miserable and (apparently) willing to be debased. Their attraction to Johnny is the hook for _Naked_'s cultural analysis, its depiction of systemic abuses, a system marked by an imbalance of power between victims and aggressors. But this is a decidedly disturbing premise: rape is the film's central metaphor, its most prominent and repeated image. Leigh's earlier films are bleak, but they're not quite so relentless, so enraged and aggressive against a specific group. Johnny is an offensive representative of even more offensive conditions, a man too hard to die and too thoughtful to survive unscathed. While it's foregone that Johnny is irredeemable, Louise tries anyway, somehow nostalgic for their long gone year together. For a moment we see her reading James Gleick's _Chaos_, an image that suggests she's at least nominally aware of the network of incoherence that's pushing Johnny (and everyone around him) to such extremes. She does seem to understand that she won't make contact except momentarily. Yet theirs is an excruciating exchange to watch. They're both so desperate. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.