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Mike Leigh may well be Britain's greatest living film director; his worldview has permeated our national consciousness. This book gives detailed readings of the nine feature films he has made for the cinema, as well as an overview of his work for television. Written with the co-operation of Leigh himself, it challenges the critical privileging of realism in histories of British cinema, placing the emphasis instead on the importance of comedy and humour: of jokes and their functions; of laughter as a survival mechanism; and of characterisations and situations that disrupt our preconceptions of ‘realism’. Striving for the all-important quality of truth in everything he does, Leigh has consistently shown how ordinary lives are too complex to fit snugly into the conventions of narrative art. From the bittersweet observation of Life is Sweet or Secrets and Lies, to the blistering satire of Naked and the manifest compassion of Vera Drake, he has demonstrated a matchless ability to perceive life's funny side as well as its tragedies.
‘So long as you’re happy’: Life Is Sweet 5 An important development in Leigh’s working life came in 1989 when he formed the production company Thin Man Films with Simon Channing-Williams, who had first worked with him on Grown-Ups as first assistant director and had co-produced High Hopes. For the company’s first production, Leigh has said that he committed himself ‘to making a comedy that would have a potentially larger audience appeal than High Hopes’,1 and this he achieved, as Graham Fuller notes: ‘Lighter and sunnier in mood than High Hopes, but equally
struggle between Leigh’s striving for documentarystyle truth and his comic or satirical impulses, which co-exist harmoniously, indeed inseparably, throughout his work, including Topsy-Turvy. Leigh’s most purely pleasurable film since Life Is Sweet, it is a scrupulous, vibrant celebration of the theatre, of theatre folk in general, and of these two men of the theatre and their associates in particular. Truly, all the world’s a stage here, and Leigh observes it with all the wry affection that he has always brought to his observations of more contemporary lives and loves
what you’re talking about’. Cyril is at least self-aware and blunt about his own lack of action: asked by Suzi, ‘Well, what do you do?’, he replies, ‘Sit on my arse’. It is therefore not hard to guess that Leigh’s sympathies lie, however reservedly, with Cyril rather than Suzi; he has said that ‘High Hopes was of course born of my own such feelings of inertia’.2 (His next film, Life Is Sweet, will also include a character for whom received ideals again do not encompass a desire actually to achieve anything or to make changes.) Yet Shirley can cut through Cyril
continuing misconception that they are: all the improvisation occurs in the preparation and rehearsal. (There are, of course, occasional onset amendments and suggestions, but no more than in the shooting of most other films.) What he does do is enhance the authenticity of the performances by giving the actors no more information than their characters know: Alison Steadman, for example, was not aware that her character’s daughter suffered from bulimia until she saw a preview of Life Is Sweet; and in Vera Drake, nobody but Imelda Staunton knew in advance that her character was
‘The future is now’: Naked 6 Nothing in the bittersweet tone or the precisely observed domesticity of Life Is Sweet prepared audiences or critics for Leigh’s next feature film, Naked, which remains his bleakest and angriest work, as well as his most controversial. It also marked his breakthrough to international recognition, and a shift in his career whereby each of his subsequent films would be radically different, in style or subject matter or both, from the one that had gone before. Indeed, in Leigh’s own opinion, ‘all of my work up to and including, and
Bleak Moments and All or Nothing, laughter and a sense of humour are seen as valid, indeed vital, responses to life. ‘You’ve gotta laugh’ is a phrase that recurs many times in Leigh’s work – though it is significant that it is usually said by characters who are not joking at the time; who have either not much to laugh about (such as Brenda Blethyn’s Cynthia in Secrets and Lies), or no discernible sense of humour at all (like Timothy Spall’s Aubrey in Life Is Sweet (1990)). Throughout Leigh’s work, laughter is a survival mechanism, and shared laughter is the key to a
Mass, no servant girl will make the bed. Now that is grave, my friends, it is no matter small: For independent spirit spreads like foul diseases! Yet life is sweet and man is weak and after all – How nice it is, for a change, to do just as one pleases! As if taking its revolutionary cue, the camera also liberates itself for the first time
received a wider UK release than any of his previous work and ‘made more at the box office than his last three films combined’;2 it also ‘took $50 million worldwide, propelling Leigh into the directorial front rank’.3 As evidence of its continuing popularity it was voted fortieth in the 1999 ‘BFI 100’ industry poll. (Life Is Sweet also made it in, at number 95, although Naked, astonishingly, was nowhere to be seen.) The film had also marked a turning point in that it moved Thin Man Films into the European co-production market, funding from the French company CiBY 2000
television comedy, telling one interviewer that ‘If I wasn’t what I am, I would be a cartoonist. My work is in the tradition of Hogarth, Gillray and Rowlandson’ (Wapshott 1982 ). Harlan Kennedy argues ( 1991 : 22) that Abigail’s Party anticipates [Leigh’s later cinema films] High Hopes and Life is Sweet