Naked (1993) on Netflix
After sex in a Manchester alley turns violent, Johnny steals a car and flees to London. He turns up at the flat of Louise, an ex-girlfriend, and seduces her flatmate Sophie.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.6/1049,403 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
Johnny is an educated, talkative man given to theories about modern culture. In a Manchester alley he has sex with a woman who says he is hurting her, pushes him off and runs away promising that her Bernard will make him pay. He collects his belongings, steals a car and leaves for Dalston in east London, where he turns up at the home of Louise, a former girlfriend from Manchester who works as a file clerk and is not pleased to see him. Louise shares the flat with Sophie, who is unemployed, and Sandra, a nurse then away in Zimbabwe.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Naked (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The scenes between David Thewlis's Johnny and Peter Wight's Brian the security guard came from an eight-hour improvisation. The uncut silhouette shot in which Johnny expounds his apocalyptic conspiracy theory had 26 takes, but Mike Leigh ended up using one of the earliest.
- The song Johnny and Louise sing near the end of Naked, "Take me back to Manchester when it's raining", was one Mike Leigh sang with friends in Habonim, the international socialist Jewish youth movement he joined as a schoolboy. After release, he heard from a retired schoolmaster at Stand Grammar in Whitefield who wrote it for a 1950 school revue.
- Leigh built Naked's script from elaborate improvisational rehearsals: actors stayed in character while interacting with the outside world, and their dialogue was then edited, or "distilled", into a screenplay. The cast was not allowed to discuss their characters with each other outside rehearsals, so that they would meet as they would in real life.
