Perversities

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In the movies, freedom is one of the forms that glamour takes. It's the grail at the end of the trail, the glow at the end of every mean street. It's what heroes fight to gain or preserve, what they become improbably articulate about in defending. It is, in short, a pretty thing treasured by pretty people.

Or was, until a street person named Johnny lurched into the mind of English writer-director Mike Leigh. Johnny is played in Naked by David Thewlis, who won the best-actor prize at Cannes for a performance so perfectly perverse that much as you want to, you cannot turn away. Or easily file and forget it.

Mostly Johnny drifts around London imposing on people. Seeking bed and board from a former girlfriend named Louise (Lesley Sharp), he has casually abusive sex with her drugged-out roommate. Taken in out of the cold by a night watchman, he stuns the man with a mad, curiously erudite monologue touching upon satanism and the occult. Alternately arrogant and self-pitying, his rant has a certain bleak wit as he intrudes menacingly on two other psychologically damaged women, gets beaten up by anonymous thugs, drags himself back to Louise, causes more chaos and is last seen hip-hopping down the road, favoring a badly sprained ankle, heading for more trouble -- heading, one is sure, for meaningless death.

Freedom, Leigh suggests, is one of the forms sociopathy takes, and it may be that his film is a necessary, even inevitable, corrective to the customary cinematic take on the subject. But when someone dwells so long on what he thinks is an ugly truth, a question naturally arises: Is it the truth the filmmaker loves, or is it the ugliness -- and its shock value -- that fascinates him?