Now available on DVD in the UK for the first time, it's worth revisiting Mike Leigh's 4th cinema feature, 'Naked'. Originally released in the autumn of 1993, it won the Best Director and Best Actor prizes at that year's Cannes Film Festival. If Leigh's newest film 'Happy Go Lucky' is of a sunny and optimistic disposition, then 'Naked' is a far bleaker, inhumane and unsympathetic appraisal of London life in the drab and economically depressed early 1990s. It's a film of dialogue and characters - there's no plot. 'Low Expectations' might be an alternative title. Set over a period of just three days, 'Naked' has at its heart a compelling performance by David Thewlis as Johnny, a Mancunian drifter first seen having unsavoury sex with a unsavoury woman in a Manchester back alley. He flees the scene, steals a car and drives South to London to begin an odyssey through Dick Pope's darkly photographed nighttime streets and a depressed and colourless wintry London.

Johnny colludes with no one and belongs to nowhere. He evokes no sympathy but is also not unlikeable. He is always unwashed, unshaven and untidy Only 27, he is also in the process of physical degeneration. But Johnny is no uncouth yob or waster, but a firestorm of intellect driven by the Bible and the prophecies of Nostradamus. Between scrounged bites of food, this is his existence.

Johnny arrives on the doorstep of the flat of his former lover Louise (Lesley Sharp) and her doped up friend Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge). Johnny and Sophie share a cigarette, a joint and then have brutal sex on the sofa. Johnny leaves the flat and wanders through the night, first encountering two homeless Scots, then Brian (Peter Wright),a lonely security guard guarding an empty office block. Together the two men wander through the building in a spellbinding set piece of that is dazzlingly delivered by Thewlis at breakneck speed as he rants about the inevitable apocalypse in 1999 and how humanity will evolve from it's present state: "The end of the world is nigh, Bri"

Johnny is deeper and more talkative than anyone else. He subsequently encounters a drunken prostitute and a dim girl (Gina McKee). He is then twice beaten up: once in an alley by youths and once by a fly poster. Beaten and bleeding, he returns to Louise's flat only to discover Jeremy (Greg Cutwell) has taken up residence. He is the Yuppie landlord, something in the city and an excruciating caricature. Jeremy is a habitual misogynist, first seen asking a masseur if women enjoy being raped. He also rapes Sophie, making her wear a nurse's uniform in the process.

At the flat, Johnny has an epileptic fit and regresses back to his abused childhood. Louise threatens to castrate Jeremy with a knife, and has a reconciliation with Johnny. But Johnny does not hang around and is last seen limping off at great speed with £290 of Jeremy's money (which had paid for Sophie's pleasure) in his pocket.

'Naked' is visually and verbally about the abuse of women and a general overview of the intellectual themes of the late 20th century. Women in the film exist mostly to be put upon, whilst Johnny may look like the lowest of the lie, he rises above the rabble with a profound sense of the bigger picture. When Louise asks where he came from, he responds with a rapid fire description of the Big Bang theory. When she asks if he's bored, he then delivers a powerful speech about the problem with people is that they're always so bored - they've had the universe, nature and the living body explained to them and they're bored with it, so what they want now is just cheap thrills and plenty of them.

I kept wondering if the film were made today what would be the targets of Johnny's intellect? Celebrity culture, the war on terror, political spin, reality TV? The film is certainly over long and two episodes (the drunken prostitute and the girl in the café) could have been jettisoned without loosing anything. Thewlis, however, delivers a once in a lifetime performance that stays with the viewer long after - and I mean years after - the film has finished.

Naked is the story of frustratingly awful people behaving in frustratingly awful ways. David Thewlis plays the main character who goes on long annoying rants about everything in the world, and yet for some reason he finds people willing to sit through his babbling. This is the type of irritating good-for-nothing guy who would probably be more likely to find himself living on the street and begging for loose change on a subway platform in real life. He's made even more reprehensible by the way he uses and abuses women, so I struggled to tolerate him any time he was on screen. It almost felt like the equally offensive character played by Greg Cruttwell was needlessly added to the film so that we'd find someone worse to watch and could possibly think Thewlis was somewhat redeemable by comparison. But since he wasn't rampantly murdering people or something markedly worse, he just felt like a different take on the same guy. There's really no plot to talk about in Naked, so all you're left with is the atrocious characters and the nonsense ramblings that come from their mouths. None of this stuff was all that tolerable (with a couple interesting snippets that stood out from the rest,) so Naked was a complete bust for me as I expected.

Mike Leigh has spent his career focusing a lot on the United Kingdom's underclass. Another characteristic of his works is the slow pace, so as to help acquaint the audience with the characters. Both of these are apparent in 1993's "Naked". The movie shows a stark contrast between the working class and ruling class, as evidenced by David Thewlis's and Greg Cruttwell's characters. But this isn't simply a story of who's good and who's bad. These are multidimensional characters. Basically, it's a look at the bare reality of life for large numbers of British citizens, while also touching on issues like alienation and misogyny. Thatcherism had eviscerated the ideals of the '60s, leaving people hopeless (and we can see many of the characters living in cramped spaces).

I don't know if I would call it Leigh's best movie - he's made a number of good ones - but it offers a good look at the desperation felt by large numbers of the UK's citizens in the wake of Thatcherism. The protagonist's conspiracy theories sound like something that Charles Manson would dream up.

Anyway, good movie. Also starring Lesley Sharp and Katrin Cartlidge (who later starred in the Oscar-winning "No Man's Land" but died of blood poisoning shortly thereafter).