FILMS/
TOPSY-TURVY
Tributes
England/USA, 1999, 160 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Wed, Apr 30 / 7:30 / Castro / AWAR30C
CREDITS
- dir
-
Mike Leigh
- prod
-
Simon Channing-Williams
- scr
-
Mike Leigh
- cam
-
Dick Pope
- editor
-
Robin Sales
- cast
-
Allan Corduner, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Katrin Cartlidge, Alison Steadman, Roger Heathcott, Lesley Manville
- source
-
Focus Features, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, CA 91608.EMAIL: Chris.Ustaszewski@focusfeatures.com
When Mike Leigh reached an American public in the late 1980s (thanks partly to SFIFF’s first U.S. retrospective in 1986) it was as the prickly bard of contemporary working-class English life. There was always levity in his vision, if also a vinegary stripe of British miserablism curdled into bitter farce. Then came the jet-black Naked (1993) and agonized Secrets and Lies (1996). So it was a little surprising when Leigh delivered a plush costume piece, even a backstage musical, in 1999’s Topsy-Turvy. This dramatization of a tumultuous juncture in the careers of Gilbert and Sullivan is no sugarplum pudding, however. It’s a bemused, fond, warts-and-all portrait of “artistic temperament” and the rigors of making popular entertainment. In 1884, genteel, sickly composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) and bellicose playwright/lyricist W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) are verging on collaborative divorce. Their latest lucrative Savoy Theatre lark, Princess Ida, is criticized as showing “symptoms of fatigue.” This irks Gilbert no end. Worse, it prompts Sullivan to insist he can’t “waste any more time on these trivial soufflés.” How the duo get past that crisis—via a wee novelty called The Mikado—propels Topsy-Turvy’s uncommonly rich stew of intrigue, pathos, saucy innuendo and lovingly staged musical sequences (the latter sung by on-screen actors). Myriad subplots delight as well. Throughout, Leigh takes infectious joy in celebrating theater’s outsized personalities. As expansive as a first-rate historical novel, Topsy-Turvy is both the costume quasi-epic one never expected from him and a movie no one else could have made.
—Dennis Harvey
Sponsored by San Francisco Chronicle, SF Gate.com.
