Topsy-Turvy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A sword falls off the wall of a study in Kensington. W. S. Gilbert — blocked, bad-tempered, sweating through the 1884 heat wave and a quarrel with his partner — looks down at it. Gilbert told that story about himself for years, and historians have never much believed it. Mike Leigh puts it in the film anyway, and gives it roughly the weight it deserves, which is a few seconds. Then he spends the next ninety minutes on what actually produced The Mikado: a woman from the Japanese Native Village exhibition at Knightsbridge teaching English actresses how to hold a fan and how to cross a room; a choreographer counting time out loud; a costumier with pins in her mouth conducting what is unmistakably a wage negotiation; roughly forty people, several months, and a firm that cannot afford another flop.

That reversal is the whole film. It is also where a philosopher becomes genuinely useful, because the thing Leigh puts on screen instead of inspiration is hard to name in ordinary critical language. It is bodies, at work, over time.

Gilles Deleuze, writing in the mid-1980s about what modern cinema had learned to do, separated films that use a body to get something done from films that attach themselves to a body and simply stay with it. He called the second kind a cinema of the body: the camera follows attitudes and postures — waiting, tiring, being dressed, being inspected — and lets the body carry the duration that plot used to carry. Almost every scene here works that way. Christine Blundell's Oscar-winning makeup is not glamour, it is occupational: paint that cracks, wigs that itch, the apparatus of stage illusion seen from three feet away. Sullivan is chronically ill and on morphine. Grossmith is needle-marked and jittery. Jessie Bond has an abscess. There is dentistry without anaesthetic. And the ensemble is asked to do something nearly no other film requires — to behave naturalistically as people whose profession is broad, artificial, presentational acting, so that two body-registers run at once, the everyday one and the ceremonial one, and neither is faked.

Deleuze borrowed a word from Brecht for the moment a posture exposes the social arrangement it sits inside: the gest. Leigh's costume fitting is the clearest one in English cinema. A performer is measured, pinned, adjusted, and the scene is entirely about money, hours, contracts, and who is permitted to complain to whom. Nobody says so. You read it off who is standing and who is kneeling. Timothy Spall's Richard Temple works the same way twice over: the face when he is told his song is cut, and then the delegation from the company that goes and gets it back. Craft and dignity turn out to be one object, and the film shows this as a posture rather than a speech.

Robin Sales cuts long. Scenes run past their dramatic point to their natural exhaustion, which is Deleuze's dead time, temps mort — stretches that advance nothing and are held anyway. Between scenes the joins are deliberately hard, episodes set down beside each other with no connective tissue, chapters rather than beats. Causality goes slack. That is why the first hour can bewilder and the last hour overwhelms: nothing has been arranged into a build, so what accumulates is not suspense but weight.

Now the strangest and best thing Leigh and Dick Pope did. The stage sequences are shot from the stalls, from the wings, from the pit, from behind the performers looking out into the house. There is never a neutral, impossible best seat. You are always somewhere in the building, and the building — front of house, dressing room, rehearsal room, office — is the film's real map. This produces what Deleuze called a crystal-image: an image in which the actual thing and its virtual double keep exchanging places until you cannot say which one you are looking at. Theatre keeps turning up in his examples for exactly this reason. A performance and its underside are the same object seen from different faces, and a backstage film is a machine for rotating it. Leigh then does something no essay could: the film was made the way its subject was made. The cast rehearsed for months under Carl Davis and sing live, unbudged, no opera dubs, with the small imperfections of working singers audible. What we watch the D'Oyly Carte company do is what the company making the movie did. The crystal has the production of the image inside it.

Deleuze's point about Renoir is that the crystal always has a flaw, a crack through which something escapes. French Cancan ends with Danglard alone in the wings while the show runs without him, and Leigh takes that deflation exactly: Gilbert vanishes from his own triumph. The last movement is not curtain calls. It is Kitty Gilbert trying and failing to tell her husband about an idea of her own, and then Leonora Braham alone under the lights singing The sun whose rays are all ablaze. Nothing can be done with either scene. You can only look and listen — what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations, the images that arrive when action has run out. Beauty produced by an exhausted, chemically-propped-up institution, and none the less beautiful for it.

The debts are real and specific. Children of Paradise established the grammar Leigh reuses wholesale: the theatre as a working plant with wings, flies, dressing rooms and auditorium held in continuous geography. The Red Shoes supplied the company procedural, the impresario as employer negotiating temperament, which Leigh keeps in the Carte–Gilbert–Sullivan triangle while removing the transcendent dream. Cabaret set the rule that every number stays on the actual stage, framed from real audience and wing positions, never floating off into someone's feelings. Nashville proved you could record vocals live to a working band and let the mix distribute attention across a company. And Song of Summer, Ken Russell's BBC film of Delius dictating notes to Fenby, is the one composer portrait that refuses the inspiration montage — the television-play realism Leigh trained in. Set against Amadeus, which is built on the metaphysics of genius, Leigh's proposition is that there is nothing there to film. Only rooms, contracts, voices, and time.

What it did: it took the heritage film's materials, the genre Andrew Higson had criticised as a nostalgic museum of surfaces, and ran social-realist procedure through them. The Savoy becomes a workplace, its performers wage labour with insecure contracts and untreated illnesses, its art a product. That was new, and Leigh's own late period — Vera Drake, Mr. Turner, Peterloo, all shot by Pope — comes straight out of it. Mr. Turner is unimaginable without it. Beyond Leigh it works less as a template than as permission: proof that two and a half hours of rehearsal can end, unanswerably, with a woman singing alone on a stage.

The film never says whether the delight was worth what it cost the people who made it. It declines the question with real seriousness, and that refusal is what makes it hold up. Watch it again and watch hands: pins, fans, needles, batons, the baize of a contract table. That is where Leigh keeps the argument.