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MovieMail's Review
Mike Leigh is undoubtedly one of the greatest working British directors today with critically masterpieces including Life is Sweet, Naked and Vera Drake. We take this chance re-appraise his work.
‘Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I’d prefer steel pins’, Mike Leigh declared. The recognised master of wry social realism, whose latest film Happy-go-Lucky was among the awards in Berlin, Leigh remains a unique director. This collection spans forty years of his work, including the UK premiere of Naked, and his 1971 debut, Bleak Moments. Highlights include the sublime Life is Sweet, the long-unavailable Career Girls, Vera Drake, (with a career-best performance from Imelda Staunton), and the delightful Topsy-Turvy, a lavish musical comedy about the making of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.
Naked is the standout title; like its wandering protagonist (played with a grimy insouciance by David Thewlis), the film is angry and eloquent, shot through with a twisting vein of coal-black humour. Even at his bleakest, Mike Leigh always shone a ray of sunshine over the kitchen sink, and these remarkable films are guaranteed to entertain as much as they provoke.
10 films from Mike Leigh, including his masterpiece, Naked and his first film, Bleak Moments, available on DVD for the first time.
Comprises:
Vera Drake (2004)
London, 1950: Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) lives with her husband Stan (Phil Davis) and their grown-up children, Sid and Ethel. They are not rich, but they are a happy, close-knit family. Vera cleans houses, Stan is a mechanic in his brother's garage, Sid works as a tailor and Ethel works in a factory testing light bulbs. But selfless Vera has a sideline which she keeps secret from all those around her. Without accepting payment, she helps young women to end unwanted pregnancies. When one of these girls is rushed to hospital following the abortion, the police investigation leads to Vera, and her world comes crashing in on her.
All or Nothing (2002)
A love story about a couple whose deep feelings for each other are rekindled when they are hit by a major family disaster. Set on a run-down family estate, All or Nothing is both poignant and funny. Phil (Timothy Spall) is a sad but philosophical mini-cab driver, while his partner Penny (Lesley Manville) works in a supermarket. Their daughter works in a home for the elderly, and their overweight son is unemployed. The film paints a vivid portrait of their lives, and those of some of their neighbours.
Topsy-Turvy (1999)
How Gilbert & Sullivan came to write their greatest hit, The Mikado. Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner star as the great duo in Mike Leigh’s sumptuous evocation of the Victorian world, with its obsession with new-fangled devices like the telephone and the fountain pen. Winner of two Oscars and a BAFTA, Topsy-Turvy is funny, sad, exotic, fascinating and sexy. Regarded by many as the most accurate movie about backstage life ever made, it includes brilliant reconstructions of the original Savoy productions, as well as the famous sequence in the Japanese Village Exhibition. The film overflows with Sullivan’s infectious, joyous music, which will leave you humming long after it’s over.
Career Girls (1997)
Former college flatmates Annie (Lynda Steadman) and Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) meet up in London for the weekend. Naturally both girls have changed since their student days of some ten years earlier. The curry-loving, "Cure"-obsessed, acne-ridden and moody flatmates of yesteryear have been replaced by confident career girls of today. As they talk, go flat-hunting, get drunk and bump into people from their past, the girls start to reminisce.
Secrets and Lies (1996)
This superlative drama, at once hysterically funny and profoundly sad, examines a wounded contemporary British family. Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young black optometrist, has just buried her beloved adoptive mother. In her sorrow, she embarks on a search for her birth mother, who turns out to be Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), a white factory worker living a lonely life with her surly daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). No one in the family, except Cynthia's brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan), knows that the teenage Cynthia gave up a child for adoption without ever seeing the baby.
Hortense contacts Cynthia, and after a heart-wrenching reconciliation, they become best friends. Cynthia convinces Hortense to attend a party and meet the family as a mate from work--but during the cake and champagne celebration, the family's secrets and lies emerge in a cathartic, emotional sweep.
Naked (1993)
Regarded as many as Mike Leigh’s masterpiece. Daring and abrasive, Naked follows the anarchic Johnny (David Thewlis) on his dark journey through a corrosive world. A profound and often shocking film, it bursts with ideas and contradictions, and is filtered with love, sex and black humour. Also stars Lesley Sharp (Bob & Rose).
Life Is Sweet (1990)
Mike Leigh’s compassionate comedy about families, food, burger bars, restaurants, chocolate, sex, anorexia, plumbing, hope, love, and much else, including spoons. Savour Timothy Spall’s hilarious manic restauranteur with his ridiculous recipes, Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent as the loving Wendy and Andy, and Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks as their very different twin daughters. Also stars Stephen Rea.
High Hopes (1988)
Contrasting its gentle, considerate hero and heroine, Cyril (Phil Davis) and Shirley (Ruth Sheen) with Cyril’s greedy, suburban sister and her husband, High Hopes ask us to reflect on the question of bringing children into the chaotic modern world. Confused by the difficulty of staying true to one’s socialist principles, and angry with Margaret Thatcher, the couple care for Cyril’s frail, elderly mother (Edna Doré), and cope with the posh, unsympathetic neighbours who are ‘gentrifying’ her street. Moving, funny and provocative.
Meantime (1984)
Meantime centres on an East End family, Mavis, Frank and their sons Mark and Colin, and their experience of unemployment, poverty and life in early 1980s Britain. When Colin comes under the influence of skinhead Coxy and when Mavis's better off sister Barbara offers Colin work, family tensions erupt into conflict. Mike Leigh's film has a superb cast of then unknowns, including Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Tim Roth and Phil Daniels. Meantime is a memorable and closely observed account of life in Thatcher's Britain.
Bleak Moments (1971)
Leigh’s first film. An attractive young woman, Sylvia, lives with her mentally handicapped adult sister, Hilda. She lets her empty garage to a drop-out hippy, Norman, whose task is to duplicate an alternative magazine in it. And she has a disastrous relationship with a tongue-tied schoolteacher called Peter. These are just some of Mike Leigh’s brilliantly conceived gallery of suburban characters, living their lives of quiet desperation and frequent absurdity. Moving and hilarious.
