Whether real or ingeniously faked, filmmakers have been recursively attracted over the decades by telling a story in one continuous take. Having made it more achievable than in Hitchcock times, digital cameras have recently renewed the interest. But only a few have succeeded where many haven’t gone beyond making it look like a nerdy gimmick. Boiling Point easily stands out amongst the former. For once, it does feel narratively apt being able to follow the action in its hectic and erratic authenticity. Tons of television programs have made us relatively acknowledged on the hardships behind the double swinging doors of a restaurant kitchen, but rarely fiction has managed to dramatise the atmosphere so vividly. Scripting the entire piece even where improvisation seems to be taking place, Philip Barantini brilliantly mixes near documentary elements with captivating individual characters’ backstories. Professional and personal dynamics intersect and clash and overlap, to truly exhilarating cinematic results.
From the opening tracking shot on Stephen Graham marching to work while apologising on the phone for some parental negligence of his, what makes Boiling Point immediately resonate—with me at least—is its tragic being a rather accurate depiction of our brave modern life, and not even much in a parodic or caricatured way. No need to reach the extents of drugs and booze abuse—although again, both more round the corner than they may seem—to get trapped by an unhealthy form of addiction. ‘I need to stop,’ says chef at some point, sweaty and exhausted. Well, I promise I am not being rhetorical by saying I could clearly hear my own voice pronouncing it, with Scouse accent too.

The shadow of a warning is cast by Blier’s outrageously daring urban nightmare. Its characters are not just cynical, irrational, or perhaps indifferent to what we may consider the received range of emotions—they simply react according to a subverted logic which is perfectly coherent, but to a different set of values. To an even more absurdist effect, Blier places the individualist feral pulses of his creatures in a cold and largely empty dehumanised environment. The aesthetics of Buffet froid echo the void embodied by the lonely figures who inhabit it—desolated train stations, soulless modernist spaces, dismal interiors of metal beams, concrete walls, wooden boxes, and a near post atomic deserted natural nowhere. The only hint to traditional beauty, art that is, in the form of Brahms’s music, is in fact a nuisance that triggers more distress, estrangement, and victims. Whether this is a menacing projection of our contemporary society or a witty caricature of it, is for the audience to say—and for them to take the leap beyond the comedic appearance of the film. Of course, that was the tense and erratic decade that followed the hysterical optimism of the previous, and yet I wonder if those concerns have really vanished forty years on. If I still burst out laughing when Depardieu introduces his new visitor to his neighbour, the police inspector, bluntly saying, ‘Je vous présente l’assassin de ma femme,’ is because some truth in that humour has outlived its time.

There is a certain clunky patchiness to Koberidze’s ambitious digressions, as if he was too besotted with his intuitions—some arguably quite striking—to be able to distil them into something truly exhilarating. The same apparent lack of focus seems to extend to the aesthetics of the film, making it look at times like the work of a cinephile revealing too much of his influences. Koberidze mentioned Russian director Aleksandre Rekhviashvili—regrettably unknown to me—as one, while I couldn’t help discerning traits of Paolo Sorrentino’s lyricism and Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist sense of humour.
And yet, as I find myself more and more bewildered by the discreet observations of the human and beastly creatures of the ancient city of Kutaisi, I realise that it is right because of its naivety that What do we see seduces.
In and out of urban folktales and personal idiosyncrasies, I slowly get what Koberidze said in an interview¹, finding it thoroughly inspiring. ‘For me, to make a film is to film the things that interest me, not necessarily just a story. I really like to go out sometimes and make pictures and watch what’s going on. I think there are enough fairy tales and secrets in the things you can see everywhere.’ Which kind of echoes a brilliant quote from Russian animator Yuri Norstein, also mentioned by Koberidze. ‘The simpler the story, the more time you have for the film.’

1. Interview: Alexandre Koberidze, Jessica Kiang (Film Comment, 12 October 2021).

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).