Despite the many characters and relative subplots, Peterloo is a masterwork of striking simplicity and linearity. Mike Leigh finds under layers of dust a shameful piece of history forgotten in the attic, and tells it with a combined sense of stage austerity and epic scale.
The enigmatic background of the opening credits, somehow reminded me of the minimalist beauty of nature as captured in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film—an almost abstract stillness at once grim and bucolic, that immediately sets the tone of the entire film. Moments later we experience the desolation on the battlefield of Waterloo through the eyes of a bewildered and traumatized bugler. There are screams, explosions, smoke, and corps, and yet it feels so very intimate and surreal—all the more as the young soldier randomly plays his sorrowful trumpet, quite off tune. It is an extremely powerful sight that, jarring with the praise with which Wellington will be shortly saluted, silently foretells the tragic epilogue.
In another fantastic sequence, Dorothy Atkinson sings with sombre optimism a touching ballad about the times getting hard. ‘For the sun it will shine, on the weavers again, for weaving of late, has been eclipsed a main.’ All the sound effects go suddenly quiet making her words even more piercing. From under the brick arches of a lower class market, their echo will resound all the way to the final stomach-churning scene—and beyond.
A brutal memento of the human political meannesses, Peterloo is an ever timely story that plants a heavy seed in the viewer’s mind.
