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Other Dashiell Writings: Flicks-April Confined
to Quarters
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Topsy-Turvy, in case you didn't know, is a film about Gilbert and Sullivan and how they came to create their masterpiece, The Mikado. And I'll tell you right off the bat that I was delighted with it from beginning to end. It's a magnificent work, beautiful in soul and in conception, glowing with love of the theater, a triumph for the writer and director, Mike Leigh. It is rare in period pieces that we escape the sense that a romantic haze separates us from the time in question, or even more commonly, that sets and costumes merely provide a quainter setting for present day themes and concerns. What Leigh has done here is stay true to the year 1885 in England and the real people that inhabited that world. Reviewers have mentioned how the film emphasizes the physical - Sullivan's gallstones, the scar on the actress' leg, the perspiration during the summer performance at the Savoy. This is in line with Leigh's intent, but I didn't find it to be that prominent an aspect of the film. More impressive is the way the characters talk to one another, not in the clipped formal diction of theater but more the way people talked informally - a different world than today in many ways, but still a world where public propriety was at odds with people's private behavior and inclinations. Leigh is an actor's director, and it is a pleasure to be in the hands of so many experts. Jim Broadbent is a brilliant Gilbert, a dominating personality when he knows what he wants from the actors, yet ever insecure and unable to enjoy his success. I was fascinated by the performance of Allan Corduner as Sullivan, at different times droll, petulant, childish, or filled with creative joy. Perhaps not as difficult a role as Gilbert, but he fills it perfectly. Among the supporting players Ron Cook is a suitably dapper and self-assured D'Oyley Carte, Timothy Spall and Martin Savage play the old ham Temple and the spry, mocking Grossmith to the hilt. Another standout is Shirley Henderson as the vain, amusing young actress Leonora Braham. Lesley Manville is a fine Lucy Gilbert - she has a great scene at the very end with Broadbent that crowns the joy of success with a private sorrow. Topsy-Turvy is about the musical theater, something of its pain and frustration, but mostly its joy. Leigh is painstaking about the process of putting a show together. One of the best scenes has Gilbert going over a particular scene with the actors over and over, quite funny and pointed about the discipline and direction needed in rehearsal. The joy of artifice, and the real work that goes into it, and the people who made it happen in a particular moment of time, that is the film's point, if you must have one. Most of all there is the music itself. There is plenty of it, as well there should be in a film about Gilbert & Sullivan, and it is performed and staged in stunning fashion. One can always find serious ideas to ponder in Leigh's comedies.
Here he indulges in escapism - or rather, in a film that seriously portrays
the art of escapism. In one brief scene, where Gilbert encounters a strange
woman in an alley, he touches on his old theme of the disparity in the
classes. But for the most part, it seems to me, Topsy-Turvy celebrates
the sheer pleasure that the theater provides us, while letting us glimpse
behind the scenes at the struggles that bring this pleasure to birth.
It's a film of tenderness and humor and delight, and I can't ask for more
than that. Considering that this is a film about a filmmaker making a film about a past event in the life of the filmmaker, you might expect a complex structure. But there are no flashbacks, no narration, no explaining of what really happened. Everything is matter of fact, simply the working out of the situation of the film in the present, with the counterpoint of the policeman's own frustrations and desires running up against that of Makhmalbaf. The style - austere to the point of dryness, radically naturalistic - is so opposite to the dominant aesthetic in film, that it takes some getting used to. There's no drama or tension or excitement. It's all a meditation on the past as perceived through acting it out in the present, with a faint touch of humor. The method is to strip away all artifice so as to expose the film for what it is - a representation, and thus opening the mind more fully to what is being represented. While I wouldn't expect or want cinema as a whole to adopt such a minimalist approach, I appreciate what Makhmalbaf is doing here, and I admire the rigor, and I might even say the ruthlessness of the method. The fundamentalist government of Iran didn't admire it too much - the film implies a relativity of experience as well as the innocence of the players in this political game, and release of the film was held up for several years until it was finally decided that the state would allow it to be shown. Trailer trash:
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Topsy-Turvy
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From
artifice to utter simplicity. A Moment of Innocence is Iranian
director Mohsan Makhmalbaf's statement about the interrelationship of
the past with our memory and its portrayal in film. The jumping-off point
is a real event in the director's life - when he was a young dissident
during the reign of the Shah, he stabbed a policeman while attempting
to get his gun, and went to jail for it. When the story begins, it is
twenty years later, and the policeman (played by the actual policeman)
has come to the director to help him make a film about the incident. He
is asked to select from a group of actors the one who will play himself.
He picks a tough, handsome young man, but the director overrules him in
favor of a scruffier actor who more closely resembles him. The policeman
is then instructed to go off and instruct his double in the coming performance,
while the director does the same with the actor who is to impersonate
him.