topsy turvy (w&d mike leigh)

Watching Leigh’s lengthy film allows plenty of time for reflection. It’s curate’s egg of a film, perhaps appropriately, given its Victorian setting. A first thought is that this is a film that abandons the central tenet of its narrative half way through. The fist half of the film is constructed around the emerging conflict between Sullivan and Gilbert. Sullivan aspires to greater things that operetta. He wants to be a serous musician. Whereas Gilbert is happy repeating the age old formula which is growing weary, but if it isn’t broke, why change it. They fall out, agree to disagree. Then Gilbert has a new idea, to set a work in Japan, and without ever engaging with Sullivan’s reasons for accepting this new project, the two are back, working as harmoniously as ever, with the second half of the film dedicated to the process of putting the Mikado on. It’s a curious shift, which makes for a rambling, whimsical film. The second observation is that Leigh’s actor’s cinema is rife with danger. The actors certainly seem to be enjoying themselves, but whether this is entirely to the benefit of the characters they are portraying is open to question. There are moments when gold is struck, such as Manville’s closing speech, but other moments when the tone, as ever in a Leigh movie, feels forced. Leigh is only really rescued by a towering central performance, (Thewlis in Naked, Spall in Turner). This goes against his collective approach, which is evident here when every character seems required to have their moment of glory, which generally encourages them to seek to upstage everyone else. As a result excellent actors frequently come across as bizarrely overacting. It’s a constant mystery the way in which Leigh is feted for his work with actors when the autonomy he grants them frequently leads them to deliver their most questionable performances. Lastly, there is the issue of self-consciousness. The Mikado is an operetta set in Japan. It’s exoticism, according to the film, helped reinvent the careers of Gilbert and Sullivan. But there is never any sense of the film interrogating the cultural implications of this appropriation of the Orient as a marketing device. How do the protagonists’ aesthetic choices lock into the context of peak Empire? This isn’t so much to suggest that the film has to come down on any side, but the film’s almost complete lack of interest in the context of The Mikado, its subject matter, feels indicative of a mindset which hadn’t changed in over a hundred years.