Mike Leigh's work a microcosm of British society

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): The British Council has a full season of Mike Leigh films running until the end of July. The showing coincidentally coincides with Leigh's big win at Cannes, and offers Jakarta filmgoers an opportunity to acquaint themselves with his early work.

The showing will feature Leigh's work between 1973 and 1984. In those 10 years he made seven full-length films for BBC television -- Hard Labour (1973), Nuts in May (1976), The Kiss of Death (1976), Who's Who (1978), Grown-Ups (1980), Home Sweet Home (1982) and Four Days in July (1984). A BBC studio version of his stage play Abigail's Party was also made in 1977.

Last month British director Mike Leigh stood with Francis Ford Coppola on stage at the Cannes Film Festival to accept this year's Palme d'Or award for his Secrets and Lies. He looked for all the world like a koala pushed out of his tree. His stance, the tilt of his head and the angle of his chin, illustrated the reluctance of a socially-committed and collaborative filmmaker to stand alone in the limelight. In his acceptance speech he said the win was a tribute to cinema about real people and the drama of ordinary life.

Mike Leigh is no Quentin Tarantino nor Spike Lee. His street- cred is of another kind. With its observations on the lives of the British working class, Leigh's work is a distinguished example of the British realism tradition. It also reflects his roots in repertory theater.

During his long directorial career, Leigh has produced mainly theater and television dramas concerned with social reality. He has emphasized developing the creative possibilities of his actors and has patiently studied life among the lower end of the middle class and the working class.

Leigh has been awarded at Cannes before. Three years ago he won Best Director for his darkly comic Naked. The lead actor, David Thewlis, won Best Actor for his role of Johnny, a young man with a cruel wit and brutal physical attitude who wreaks havoc on friends and acquaintances yet still seems a victim of harsh social circumstance.

In comparison, Life is Sweet (1991) was a mild critique of British society, having a go at the inertia and groundless optimism of a lower middle-class family living in contemporary London. Leigh's High Hopes (1988) was his first cinema feature, but his feature directorial debut,Bleak Moments, was made back in 1971.

Juxtaposed with the thrill and thrust of mainstream movie hype, Leigh's cinema seems eccentric. It is short on glamour, short on the chutzpah of young stud direction, short on fancy camera and lighting effects, short on meaning-making mise-en- scene. It is short on just about everything pop cinema uses to validate its artform status.

Against the stringently natural scenarios -- from a mail sorting room to the lace curtains and floral wallpaper in Home Sweet Home; from the shoe store to the funeral parlor to the Co- op supermarket in The Kiss of Death; between Protestant household and Catholic household in Four Days in July -- Leigh and his actors bring life to light with compelling, improvised performances. Leigh evolved his improvised method while directing stage plays in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"Devised and directed by Mike Leigh" is the byline for the collaborative process by which these films come into being. Leigh was commissioned by the BBC to make each of them before there was a script, or a storyline or even a structure, because the corporation understood these things would evolve as the director and his actors developed characters and their interactions in workshops.

Circumstances

Home Sweet Home follows the lives of three postal workers, Stan, Harold and Gordon. They share a mail room, but their domestic circumstances are completely different. Older Stan, a philanderer, lives alone now that his wife and teenage daughter have left; younger Gordon seems to have lost his drive and his energetic wife Hazel is getting impatient; and innocent Harold goes home to a complaining, chain-smoking wife who sits propped up in bed reading romance novels. Harold's wife is having an affair with Stan, Gordon's wife is thinking about it, and the complications reach a climax with a big fight between the lot of them at Stan's front gate.

On behalf of Stan's teenage daughter, a Social Services professional drops into this world from time to time. A gushy female social worker with "quiche-lorraine attitudes" is replaced by a young male social worker who arrives at the close of the film with a kettle under his arm and launches into a soliloquy of academic jargonizing. He is another do-gooder out of touch with the client. At the end he asks Stan whether he has any questions. Stan answers yes; he wants to know what the kettle is for. You laugh out loud and you squirm. This is Mike Leigh.

Who's Who strikes a lighter note. It looks at the backroom of a stockbrokerage staffed by a group of Londoners from very different social levels. Young, upper-class brokers pass by in the corridor outside, exchanging comments about their girlfriends and comparing their sex lives.

An upper-class aspirant and avid Debrett's Peerage reader, Alan, just listens -- and misses the point entirely. Like when classy Miss Hunt (Geraldine James is a recognizable face here) comes to visit his home. Alan's wife breeds cats and Miss Hunt announces that she has come to buy a Chinchilla because "they had run out of Chins at Harrods."

Alan, who collects autographs and traces family trees, explains why the class system survives. Aristocracy is maintained because there are people still prepared to serve it.

The Kiss of Death takes an even more microcosmic view. This time, the lives of two young men and their two young female companions are scrutinized. Ronny works in a funeral parlor and his mate Trevor works at the local Co-op supermarket. Their friends Sandra and Linda are more articulate and easier to read than either of their boyfriends, but then the young men's aspirations seem so blunted in the landscapes of little opportunity.

Four Days in July (1984), the most recent of Leigh's films to being shown by the British Council, has a much stronger sense of place. The other films are more like films of the original stage plays.

The 1984 film begins with the standard location shot opener. The camera gazes down an Ulster backstreet, where kids are strolling in summer clothes and pet dogs sniff around, but then an armored vehicle cuts across the frame - left to right, right to left -- on a routine patrol.

Community strife in Northern Ireland is observed by two storylines running parallel in two households, one Catholic and one Protestant. In each, a new first baby is soon to be born and the film cuts backwards and forwards between the two homes. Once again the actors are so brilliant in their parts that its like watching a documentary of subjects unaware of the camera.

The film sketches the middle ground shared between these two young couples and their circle of friends. Rabid extremes are represented by two loony characters' cameos at the beginning and end of the film. Bookended by the extremes, the middle ground still looks tough against the bullet-riddled walls and boarded windows of Falls Road.

The "four days" take place in the lead time up to the birth of each child and ends with the two women alongside each other in a maternity ward. They face the future looking out of frame in opposite directions. Four Days is an astringent comment on Northern Ireland.

Other films to be screened over June and July are Nuts in May, which examines 1970s counterculture in the gray dawn of a new and unsympathetic world, and Grown-Ups, which looks at the uncertain world of young newlyweds living in their first apartment.

Watching any of the films offers insight into the very unusual world of Mike Leigh.