Mike Leigh

Topsy-Turvy Girls, Career Boys: Career Girls and Topsy-Turvy

80 | Mike Leigh forms, a grid now adopted not to show plot’s tyranny (as did the grid of Four Days in July) but instead to connote plot’s potential for liberation. The movie follows this design with two final stenciling gestures. First, the view cuts to a high angle of the women in the garden, now joined by Cynthia—thereby duplicating the cut to a high angle after the sisterly side-by-side at the end of Life Is Sweet. Like that earlier film, Secrets and Lies transforms characters who seem irreversibly set in their ways into characters who accept the necessity, or at least the usefulness, of conventions—that is, of stenciled versions of the self and the world. Hortense presents a seemingly banal moral to her sister—“Best to tell the truth, innit? That way no one gets hurt”—by way of wrapping up their rapprochement, and we might wince. As a fixed code of behavior, this stenciled sentiment would seem inadequate to the complications of the world—as will be demonstrated by Vera Drake, whose interior and exterior lives explode when the truth is told. Second, in a move that allows Secrets and Lies to provide its own critique, we hear cheerful Cynthia dithering over her girls, pleased that they have gotten a happy ending: “Look at you, sitting there—like a couple o’ garden gnomes.” The happy ending does threaten to turn everyone into a garden gnome: a cuter, smaller, friendlier, less animate version of a real person. We might call this a “character.” That may be both the difficulty, and the desired consolation, of narrative art. Topsy-Turvy Girls, Career Boys: Career Girls and Topsy-Turvy Late in the twentieth century, Mike Leigh made a film that doesn’t look or sound much like a Mike Leigh film. Its visual style displays none of the hallmarks I have been tracing—the unbroken shots, the side-bysides , the visual centaurs. The film’s sound track is likewise surprising— a smooth jazz sheen with lounge-bar vocalizations, the kind of music that sets a permanent mood of limpid emotional accessibility and of the conventional pleasures of mainstream cinema. The film’s dialogue features the lexicon of psychological self-examination, as characters spill their guts about vulnerability, parents, childhood, searching for a good partner—the kind of immediate exteriorizing of the internal that i-xii_1-196_O'Sul.indd 80 6/24/11 8:33 AM The Nature of Contrivance | 81 Leigh’s films historically have avoided with great care. The film’s narration offers moments when we enter, for the first time in his career, the consciousness of its main characters—moments constructed, as such moments are traditionally constructed in the kinds of films Leigh avoids imitating, with close-ups of the characters staring thoughtfully into the distance, close-ups reminiscent of the formulaic interiority of Hollywood storytelling. The film’s structure relies on flashbacks throughout its eighty-seven minutes—a clear departure for a director whose earlier work had always followed a strict forward chronology, a new stratagem that showed Leigh blatantly reorganizing the events of the real rather than appearing to stand in removed observation of them. And the film’s conclusion presents a flurry of startling coincidences that seem to shatter verisimilitude, foregrounding the artifice of authorial machination over the empire of the plausible. The most obvious candidate for a late-twentieth-century Mike Leigh film that doesn’t look or sound much like a Mike Leigh film is TopsyTurvy (1999), a Gilbert and Sullivan drama of the Victorian world, festooned with comic songs. But clearly the film I have been describing is not Topsy-Turvy. As I will show, Topsy-Turvy, despite its radically different subject and historical moment, manifestly explores many of the recurrent elements I have been identifying; its visual predilections, its bipartite structure, its opaque presentation of characters’ consciousness , and its thematic preoccupations all correspond directly with fellow members of the Leigh corpus. Rather, the unlikely candidate—the film I have sketched above—is Career Girls (1997), a sometimes neglected work sandwiched between two of the director’s greatest successes. When considered another way, reduced to certain bare elements of character and plot, Career Girls might look very much like a Mike Leigh film. What could be more typical than a story of young-to-middle-aged people adrift in the world, chitchatting on a weekend in which nothing transformative happens, and parting in a way that resolves absolutely nothing...