The Art Of Nakedness

Occasionally a piece of art can have such a profound effect that it haunts your life, clings to your shadow and becomes an internal rhythmic metronome - colouring all your senses with its emotional resonance. In 1993 Mike Leigh produced such a work and even now over fifteen years later 'Naked' lingers in my thoughts and remains one of the most profound films chronicling the human condition I've ever had the privilege to see.
Alongside Gary Oldman's 'Nil By Mouth' these films detail the sallow disintegration of British society but with very different agendas at their core. Whereas Oldman simply lifts a mirror with a measured hand and allows the viewer to saturate themselves in the despair, Leigh's film has an intellectual arc - probing and unflinchingly gazing into the abyss to look for meaning. Once seen, you're changed forever and both richer and poorer in spirit for it. It's brave and astounding cinema of the highest order and it's almost depressing writing this knowing that somehow I lack the capacity to truly sum up why these films are so important so I'll reluctantly let another do it for me. You see when I start to articulate myself internally about this my heart drips tears like a slashed blood bag, it's simply no good.
This review of 'Naked' by thearbiter on IMDB feels as though he sneaked into my room at the stroke of midnight, sat on face and stole my very thoughts a bit like a cat in those old wives tales.

Devastating, 24 June 2001
Author: thearbiter

In my adult life, this is the one and only film that has ever moved me to tears with its ending. It was like watching Michelangel applying his final daub to the Sistene Chapel, the incomprehensible achievement of a perfect artistic vision, and the attainment of a transcendent brilliance.

For years, I had fantasized about becoming a writer / director, and actually put forth some appreciable effort to that end. This film, Mike Leigh's incomparable, unprecedented masterwork, cured me of that fantasy. He said, and did, in two hours, all that I could have hoped to achieve in an entire career, and it became gapingly obvious to me that I had no business in this medium.

There is no "story" here, except that of the distilled essence of the hopeless pre-Millenial Western man, robbed of the promised nuclear annihilation he had always consciously feared, but subconsciously hoped for, if only to put the world out of its misery. The naked and the lost, the wandering spectre of the sentient living dead, and the pitiful yet mercifully ignorant companions that cross his path.