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.

Two Flemish peasant women walk on a country path at sunset, amiably chatting, probably heading home after a day of work. We follow their cheerful strolling for a while until the silhouette of a top-hatted man grabs our attention from the background. He is sketching in a notebook. Of course, we know who he is. It’s a striking opening shot, yet not as defining as we’ll get to realise in retrospect, while the film unfolds.
Something extremely exciting or terribly dull typically comes from art recounting itself. To treat someone like JMW Turner as an extraordinary man—when extraordinary is indeed what he was—would have been tempting, if anything. But Mike Leigh does things differently, taking us down a far more fascinating route. Avoiding to fall into the facile celebrative clichés of the genre, he reminds us that genius is nothing but the result of extraordinary efforts made by very ordinary human beings. His Turner gropes maids, disavows children, and grunts like a pig, but he is essentially as bad or good as any creature on this bloody earth.
The amber perfection of Mr. Turner’s photography had initially put me off. Its relentless golden hour lights are arguably unlikely, all the more in Chelsea and Margate. Then it occurred to me that such a cinematographic obstinacy couldn’t be just a rootless aesthetic choice, but maybe an attempt at filtering the world through the voracious gaze of a man in love with the romantic violence of colours. ‘Colour is contradictory,’ says Turner to Mrs Somerville with piercing eyes. His art is ferociously passionate, so the palette of Mr. Turner—the film—or so it is as maybe.
Although not being one of my favourite Mike Leigh’s films, Mr. Turner does leave me with the vivid memory of some really superb moments. The way it ends for instance, those last two shots on the most important women in the artist’s adult life—again, so contrasting and yet somewhat complementary—really are the touch of a master.

I was lucky enough to see Vera Drake having absolutely no clue what it was about. I could guess from the very pretty hat Imelda Staunton wears in the photo on the poster the time, and from the brick wall out of focus to her left the place—although I am sure that brick walls exist in other cities too. London’s early Fifties are a particularly interesting historical moment to set a debate on a subject that will never cease to be controversial.
To his habit, Mike Leigh subverts any received cinematic narrative convention bringing the inciting incident quite far into the film. Up until things get shaken, we are invited step by step not just into a world we might not know, but into its mentality. It is a time of hardship in a city heavily scarred by the Blitz, where food is still being rationed and poverty is extreme. By the time we are revealed what Vera’s secret business is (here is the privilege of not knowing what that is), we are too familiar with the characters to elude a confrontation between their reactions and our own. Mike Leigh himself couldn’t have articulated it better when interviewed by Amy Raphael said, ‘An important thing about all my work is that it’s about looking at the world in such a way that you see every character as being rounded and at the centre of his or her universe. So we looked at it from the point of view of the people having abortions, of the abortionists, of the police, of the medical profession, and so on.’¹ It won’t surprise us to find bits of our inevitably faceted thinking on the matter in every single character—from the more understanding to the unamenable, or the cynical.
If ever a definite position is taken by Leigh in the film, that’s an overall political one. Vera Drake is the portrayal of a world with no baddies, puppeteered by rules that despite their understandable ethical intentions, effectively put the wealthy and the poor in completely different positions. It was right in postwar Britain that Orwell published Animal Farm giving us one of the wittiest observations ever made on our society—‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Not much had changed in Vera Rose Drake’s years. Not much has to this day.

1. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).

In what looked to me the most meaningful moment in a film that has certainly many and more obvious, a wasted Marion Bailey crosses the yard of the decayed housing estate she lives in, probably headed for some more booze at the local off license. On her wobbly way, she bumps into a very young James Corden who’s juggling solo with a football. ‘You are on your own, aren’t you?’ she asks. ‘So?’ says he genuinely baffled, for once not trying to be confrontational.
Delving into more than a few important themes, All or Nothing is at heart, and probably more than any of Mike Leigh’s films, about loneliness—that of a cab driver who spends his life with strangers and ironically bonds with the one client least expected to be sympathetic, that of a pregnant girl abandoned by her boyfriend, that of all of them, and us, who ‘live as we dream,’ recalling a famous quote from Heart of Darkness, ‘alone.’ But it’s also about support in the mutual recognition of our inescapable existential state—about having each other, ‘or we have nothing,’ as Timothy Spall says in a most touching pas de deux with Lesley Manville.
Mike Leigh’s reflective journey into the dismal and the unfair is far from being the gloomy exercise in pessimism that some had superficially decided to have seen—it is rather a profoundly absurdist and passionate take on life in its exciting and bloody fullness.

As pointed out by Jonathan Romney reviewing Secrets & Lies¹, Mike Leigh’s ability in ‘pinning down all the nuances of behaviour and decor that immediately locate a character socially and emotionally’ is a device ‘that can easily lead to caricature,’ or rather—I’d dare rephrasing—to the misinterpretation of the author’s intentions. Career Girls is a good example. I am completely sure that such types exist—in fact, I might be one—but I can’t help receiving all the performances in the film as a little over the top. Do I find this as ‘irritating’ as many legitimately might? Maybe not, and yet that does create some distance between me and the characters. Had I watched this on stage, where physical space is an element of theatre, I wouldn’t have been bothered as much. But in a film, where the lens put me in a far more intimate, if not intrusive, position, I couldn’t avoid constantly acknowledging the craft.
What I still enjoyed of the film is its pace, its not rushing for an obvious payoff. Locating in the same area of Naked, the lack of a perceived plot stands as proof of trust towards the characters, the actors, and ultimately the audience. Talking to Amy Raphael about it, Mike Leigh appropriately speaks of a certain inventive freedom, which I think it’s palpable. ‘I don’t really want to use the word ethereal, but that would kind of explain what the film’s about. It’s something to do with what Hannah and Annie are experiencing.’²
Its improbable series of coincidences contributes to the metaphorical—‘maybe spiritual,’ in Leigh’s words again—dimension of the film. Career Girls is about the long journey from our twenties to our thirties, and therefore adultness. Our perspective changes more in that decade than any other in our life. We might look at Ricky as a funny lovable guy in uni years, but no doubt we see his tragedy when we meet him again in the narrative present days, as do Hannah and Annie. But the film also seems to remind us that where we are is always a lot closer to where we came than to where we are headed. I am not sure if I like the notion, but while I write it I begrudgingly admit it is fascinatingly as true as Leigh’s dramatic depiction of our unconscious need for roots.

1. Secrets and Lies, Jonathan Romney (The Guardian, 23 May 1996).
2. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).

I should have watched it twenty years ago—or maybe not. I am not sure whether it’s more exciting or scary to see my life dissected to this level of insight and different pieces of me projected onto various fictional characters—my own nightmares, ambitions, mental health extravagances, even the spectacle frames I used to wear in my John Lennon phase. Funny. Art always knows us better than we could ever do, but it still feels uneasy to discover how literal that knowledge can be.
‘There is an Aubrey in all of us,’ says Mike Leigh. ‘He is desperately sad. He really has all the aspirations, but his fear renders him dysfunctional.’¹ So true, I am afraid, and yet there’s a deep sense of love and optimism to Tim Spall’s extravagant character. He is the one who tries for real. And yes he fails, but no matter, because we all know that he’ll try again, fail again, and fail better.
However dealing once more with the controversial side of Margaret Thatcher’s complicated years (by then close to resigning, with that setting an end to her third and final term) Life is Sweet leaves the sociopolitical cause in the background to bite instead into the faceted intersections between private and family dynamics. Fascinating how Mike Leigh gradually dares beyond the cheerfulness of the film’s perpetually sunny days making of food, whether industrial, exotic or junk, a clever central thread in the dramatisation of the different forms of struggle on show—and how the message carried is still as timely and vivid as it must have been at the time.

1. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).

Sketching the social spectrum of the time through hilarious vignettes, the first part of High Hopes is sparkling. Characters are quirky, the situations preposterous, and yet its realism is sharp and caustic as a documentary. In Mike Leigh’s words, ‘it’s the only film I’ve made that involves anything you could really call satire, is culpable of caricature, and where the deliberate device is employed of heightening in a comic way some characters against others in order to make an implicit statement.’¹
But what really turns High Hopes into a tragicomic masterwork is grandma’s birthday party, where the general hysteria climaxes in an absolutely exhilarating scene of acting and writing bravura. What follows is an unexpected plunge into an even deeper, brutal reflection on the current times and Mike Leigh’s harshest take on Thatcherism thus far. Somehow suggesting that grandma’s point of view coincides with that of the film itself, the final scene on the rooftop is particularly stunning and moving. Her overwhelmed staring look over the city evokes a vivid sense of frustration, defeat, anger, but also projects a certain unexpected positivity onto the whitish sky of London. Perhaps the title is not so sarcastic after all. And by the way, this is the cinema that had a voice.

1. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).

Mike Leigh’s debut behind the camera is far from being bleak. It is indeed, but it’s also hilarious, extremely witty, and admittedly quite political. On show is the aphasic awkwardness stereotypical of the postwar culture of the done thing—a ‘neurotic mantra,’ as described by Leigh¹, that shaped the British middle class for about three decades through a code of social habits accepted as proper. Communication is the idea, or rather a projection of one, around which the narrative of the film orbits, and of course its characters. A professor, a communicator by profession, who can’t articulate his interest in a woman loses himself in aimless lucubrations on the communicative value of textile design. A hippie loner working as a duplicator for an indie magazine dreams of making a living with his music. A woman escapes her disastrous social efforts seeking a connection with the spirits instead. Another attractive woman, lone sherry drinker, would like to be a writer. Her invalid sister is ironically the only one in the bunch inhibited by her physical condition as opposed to self-conscious restraints or, again, the received notion of how she should behave. Meaningfully, the film opens on Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2—a classical tune poorly played on an old piano. But these characters are particularly representative of their time, not just for the social spectrum they portray. While the adults chronically fail to find themselves at ease and go about either sporting their clumsiness or criticising any unconventional behaviour, there’s a rather greasy youngster who sings of drugs and freedom, and whose shy ambitions are already mining a structure that’s become obsolete and, as we well know today, will bring his generation far.

1. From the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of Abigail’s Party (Penguin, 2017).