Film - Jonathan Romney watches Mike Leigh's meticulous tribute to the masters of the Savoy
As a rule, Mike Leigh doesn't do genre films. Indeed, his portraits of the asperities of British life have effectively created a genre in themselves. But his new film, Topsy-Turvy, is at once Victorian costume drama, biopic and backstage comedy. It takes some nerve to tackle three unfamiliar genres in one go, and still more to take Gilbert and Sullivan as your subject. After a century, the popular jury is still out on G&S: anyone who isn't a fully paid-up D'Oyly Cartist will come to Topsy-Turvy still uncertain whether the Savoy Operas are archaic fustian or brilliant satiric confections ripe for reappraisal. The only certainty is that, when you see the film, you'll realise that you knew more of the songs by heart than you suspected.
In fact, Topsy-Turvy has all the Leigh trademarks: an ensemble of fine-tuned performances, with close mapping of characters' idiosyncracies - the way they use language and move in the world. Everything is so acutely observed - "analysed" might be a better word - that the Leigh eye is always evident, from the eating of oysters to the awkward early uses of the telephone. We tend to imagine that we know exactly how Leigh works with his actors - extended preparation, making them "live" in a part for months at a time. Yet he has always been exceptionally guarded about what that method actually entails; so we can only wonder how it might have been applied here. It's one thing for David Thewlis, preparing for Naked, to devour several Penguin Modern Classics a day, quite another to imagine that Jim Broadbent spent six months with his moustaches perfectly waxed, or that the entire cast might have lived cooped up together in a larger version of The 1900 House.
In a sense, Leigh has always gone in for comic opera. The performances he favours are so far from naturalistic drama or comedy that, with their extraordinary heightened modulations, they are actually closer to opera than to straight acting: Brenda Blethyn practically sings her leitmotif, "Alright darlin", in Secrets and Lies. The skills it takes to act for Leigh may actually have most in common with the sort of breathing techniques and deportment required to perform a perfect Lord Chancellor's "Nightmare Song".
The story begins a decade into the partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan, with the lukewarm reception of Princess Ida. W S Gilbert (Jim Broadbent resembling a weary, even more blimpish Auberon Waugh) grizzles at a review detailing "symptoms of fatigue". Meanwhile, the bon viveur Sir Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) is tired of "trivial souffles". You can't help suspecting that the film is Leigh's own response to becoming a national institution with the magisterial Secrets and Lies , then hitting an awkward anti-climax with Career Girls; Topsy-Turvy's primary subject is the difficulty of finding new tricks in a sustained career.
G&S - tellingly not seen together until 45 minutes into the film - are saved by The Mikado, arrived at by chance when Mrs Gilbert (Lesley Manville) persuades her husband to visit a Japanese exhibition. This is one of several ways in which the film reworks the conventions of the Hollywood backstage musical. Another is the way that a song from the show is axed, then reprised. It's fated to be the show-stopper, the Mikado's "punishment fits the crime" number.
The film is also good on the routineness of success and its effect on the private life. In a wonderfully poignant scene, Gilbert slouches home with another success under his belt: his ever-solicitous wife starts feeding him an idea for the next opera, but it's really her harshly realistic commentary on their marriage.
The 160-minute running time is more than justified by the way the film sprawls into a chorus of key moments and dazzling turns: among them, Gilbert's aged father (the imposingly rheumy Charles Simon) lapsing into aggrieved dementia; Timothy Spall and Kevin McKidd in a savourous luvvie double act; and Shirley Henderson's sensually etiolated soprano. The music, of course, is not only in the numerous, handsomely staged songs, but also in the dialogue. When Ron Cook's Richard D'Oyly Carte announces "I could murder a pork chop", it may seem anachronistic, but if Leigh - who tends to research these things - says it's so, then who's to argue?
"Topsy-Turvy" (12) opens 18 February nationwide
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