Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 13

The single greatest performance by a British actor in the 1990s was by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's Naked, as (say the following very fast from the back of your nose, like John Lennon) a cheeky fucking manky Mancy monkeh called Johnny, a hyper-articulate autodidact ignoramus – are you following me, love? – who flees the north and ends up dropping off the radar enfuckingtirely in London, because it's just such a great warm welcoming fucking carnival out on the streets in the Big Shitty, knoworrimean, that he practically perishes from stuffing himself with the free poxy fucking marzipan the pearly kings and queens are giving out, are you with me, love? Peachy fucking creamy.

Johnny talks like this all the time. He takes a linguaphiliac delight in polysyllables and goes at everyone like a razorblade with his half-baked conspiracy theories and his patchy understanding of Nostradamus and the Book of Revelation and Chaos Theory – a performance which is forensically accurate about a certain type of smart-arse Mancunian educated at a time when comprehensives still did The Odyssey and Paradise Lost. I knew this Johnny. I had met about six of him. Undefeatable in argument, destructive, self-destructive, too clever by three-quarters, both frightening and irresistible to women. And Thewlis's creation was a note-perfect capturing of a type no one had ever captured before, a type whose essence was that you could never capture him, whose whole raison d'être was to evade capture. This was news, a new species for the zoo, grabbed from the world so gleaming and fresh that the rest of the film and indeed the rest of Mike Leigh's work – which we all regarded as the acme of realism – looked like a cartoon.

Thewlis's Johnny has those beautiful wrist-bones which you want to grab to stop his even more beautiful hands from slapping you. His voice quarries out every bit of music contained in the Manchester accent. The mouth beneath the ratty overbite is incapable of anything but sarcasm or supersincerity. That fast, straight-backed walk, like a cursor gliding along a line, looks like the walk of someone walking out on you. And all of these – hands, voice, mouth, walk – are fuelled by that peculiar youthful delusion: integrity. Only when you're young are you so hounded and harried by the fear of being fake, as if a single lie will curse you forever. The God of Integrity wants you to keep running, to never do anything twice, to worship the present tense, to reject comfort as a Siren. He is a cold god who would only really be happy if everyone were on their own, and only the young dream of him. But Thewlis is ten years older than Holden Caulfield, and Johnny is ten years deeper into hell, drowning in north London, in Bounds Green and Southgate and Edmonton, among those tall houses whose white stucco looks like icing in a Richard Curtis movie and like armour plating in Naked. It wasn't wishable-away, this performance, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Thewlis turned the film into a horror flick for the lower middle classes. He scared the living daylights out of me.