Bleak Moments (Mike Leigh, 1971)

Cast: Anne Raitt, Sarah Stephenson, Eric Allan, Joolia Cappleman, Mike Bradwell, Liz Smith, Malcolm Smith, Donald Sumpter, Christopher Martin, Ronald Eng, Reginald Stewart. Screenplay: Mike Leigh. Cinematography: Bahram Manocheri. Art direction: Richard Rambaut. Film editing: Les Blair. 

Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1990)

Alison Steadman and Timothy Spall in Life Is Sweet

Wendy: Alison Steadman
Andy: Jim Broadbent
Natalie: Claire Skinner
Nicola: Jane Horrocks
Patsy: Stephen Rea
Aubrey: Timothy Spall
Nicola's Lover: David Thewlis
Paula: Moya Brady

Director: Mike Leigh
Screenplay: Mike Leigh
Cinematography: Dick Pope
Production design: Alison Chitty
Music: Rachel Portman

In Life Is Sweet Mike Leigh switches his focus from the angry working class and soulless yuppies of High Hopes (1988) to the muddling-through lower middle class, coping with a world they never made but doggedly trying to make the best of it. Andy hates his work as a chef in an institutional kitchen, but he keeps on at it. Wendy, his wife, holds a couple of part-time jobs, one as a children's dancercise teacher, the other as a salesclerk in a children's clothing store. Her cheerful laugh hides disappointment and pain, some of it generated by their twin daughters. Natalie has short hair and works as a plumber, and we sense that there has been some concern from the parents about her lifestyle, though everyone maintains a façade of contentment. But Nicola has unkempt long hair and does nothing but lie about the house, snarling and smoking and mouthing left-wing slogans, and having slightly kinky sex with her boyfriend. Nicola is also bulimic, a disorder she hides from her parents, though her twin hears the vomiting through the thin row-house wall that separates their bedrooms, and Nicola has been hospitalized before. Despite this, the film is decidedly comic, partly because Andy and Wendy have friends who aren't always as helpful as they could be. Patsy persuades Andy to buy a rundown trailer that has been converted into a hamburger stand, with the idea that Andy can make enough money on weekends to eventually quit his job. Aubrey is trying to open a French restaurant with an Edith Piaf theme, the Regret Rien, and when his waitress decamps just before the opening he persuades Wendy to take her place. Disasters ensue, leaving the characters teetering on the line between hilarity and tragedy, as life in Leigh's film so often does. The "sweetness" in the film lies in the fact that Andy and Wendy are genuinely nice people who suffer fools gladly, even if they're their own daughters and friends (or each other). Leigh is never content to stick to formula, however, no matter how much the conventional logic of film comedy seems to demand it, so every moment of Life Is Sweet is likely to hold a surprise: The characters do and say things we wouldn't necessarily expect of them. The performances are uniformly brilliant, as we might expect of this particular roster of British actors, and Rachel Portman's lovely, almost subliminal score backs them up well.

High Hopes (Mike Leigh, 1988)

Ruth Sheen and Phil Davis in High Hopes

Cyril: Phil Davis
Shirley: Ruth Sheen
Mrs. Bender: Edna Doré
Valerie: Heather Tobias
Martin: Philip Jackson
Laetitia: Lesley Manville
Rupert: David Bamber
Wayne: Jason Watkins

Director: Mike Leigh
Screenplay: Mike Leigh
Cinematography: Roger Pratt
Production design: Diana Charnley
Music: Andrew Dickson

Mike Leigh's excoriating satire of Thatcherite Britain, High Hopes, ranges from shrill to droll, from gratingly silly to quietly touching. A film like it from any other director might have been said to be out of control, but as usual Leigh knows exactly what he's doing, and he does it brilliantly if annoyingly. Annoyance is, in fact, part of the process: If we object that his characters are unreal, over the top, his response would have to be yes, but you know who they are, don't you? And we do, from the shabby socialists, Cyril and Shirley, to the working-class strivers who can't rise above their bad taste, Valerie and Martin, to the parvenu Tories, Laetitia and Rupert. We've all seen their likes, even in the United States -- perhaps they're even more noticeable in today's Trumpian America. Fortunately, Leigh knows to ground his satire in people we can sympathize with, namely, Cyril and Shirley. They are menial cogs in the capitalist machine, he's a motorcycle courier, she works for a landscape gardener, and they rage against the system, especially Cyril, who drags Shirley to Highgate Cemetery to worship at the grave of Karl Marx. She's more interested in the foliage -- "That ivy could use a pruning," she notes -- than in the moribund class struggle, but she loves her man, even if he doesn't want to have children because he doesn't want to bring anyone else into an overpopulated world in which socialism has failed. Poor as they are, they have good hearts, taking in the mentally challenged stray Wayne for a night and putting him up in their "spare room," which is a large closet with a mattress and sleeping bag. But they have to contend with family: Cyril's aging mum, who precipitates a crisis by locking herself out of her house, and his giddy sister, Valerie, whose husband runs a used-car lot and is a thorough cad. The crisis introduces us to mum's gentrifying next-door neighbors, Laetitia and Rupert, who have bought one of the row houses in a council estate and are renovating it to the height of yuppie chic. Rupert proclaims his mantra: "What made this country great was a place for everyone and everyone in his place." Then he adds, "And this is my place." The scenes from the lives of Laetitia and Rupert and from those of Valerie and Martin are hysterically funny, but Leigh knows that a little of them goes a long way -- a little of Valerie's manic giggle goes a very long way indeed -- so he wisely turns back to the more identifiably human (and humane) Cyril and Shirley to put things into perspective. The film concludes with Cyril and Shirley taking his mum up to the roof of the building in which they live to admire the rather drab view of the St. Pancras railway yards and the gasworks, with just a peek at St. Paul's. For once in the film, mum, who is usually sunk in senile confusion and depression, brightens a little: "This is the top of the world," she says. God help us, but it probably is.

Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

Midway through the film, Johnny (David Thewlis) happens upon a parked limousine whose driver is dozing at the wheel. Waking up, the driver mistakes Johnny for his client and invites him into the limo, only to realize his mistake suddenly and order Johnny out. He's one of the few lucky ones in Naked: Lots of other people invite Johnny in, only to realize their mistake after he's wrought chaos in their lives. For Johnny is less a realistic character than a symbolic force: the spirit of anarchy loose in a world that's trying to impose something like order. Johnny is something of a Shakespearean fool, licensed to deflate pomposity, to expose absurdities like the meaningless job of Brian (Peter Wight), the security guard for an empty building: "You're guarding space? That's stupid, innit? Because someone could break in there and steal all the fuckin' space and you wouldn't know it's gone, would you?" Writer-director Mike Leigh typically begins his filmmaking in disorder -- sessions in which the actors improvise what their characters are like, what they might do or say in a given situation, and how their interrelationships might work out -- and ends in order -- a scripted film in which the actors are not allowed to deviate from what's on the page. He is fortunate in Naked to have had a brilliant company, headed by Thewlis, to find out what's in their characters. In Naked, Johnny is reading James Gleick's Chaos, which posits an underlying pattern to what appears random and chaotic. Johnny is the butterfly flapping its wings that causes a storm to sweep through the lives of flatmates Louise (Lesley Sharp), Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), and Sandra (Claire Skinner) -- not that they don't already lead lives of quiet (and sometimes noisy) desperation. It can be argued, however, that Johnny, for all his sponging amorality and his sexual aggression, represents something of a life force in the film, especially when contrasted with the rich and predatory Jeremy (Greg Crutwell), a character Leigh introduces I think intentionally to serve as a foil for Johnny, who at least has a measure of self-awareness even if sometimes it has to be beaten into him. Never let it be said that Leigh uses nudity gratuitously: It's gym-toned Jeremy who stays snugly encased in his designer briefs but scrawny Johnny who strides boldly toward the camera, genitals aflop.  Viciously funny, tonically brutal, Naked is one of those wake-up-call films we need to subject ourselves to now and then.