Thursday, October 12, 2017
285 - Life is Sweet, United Kingdom, 1990. Dir. Mike Leigh.
At our acting school we have an exercise for advanced students called the Mike Leigh.
We got it from The Larry Moss Studio, where Larry passed it on to his protege and master teacher, Michelle Danner, who now uses it at Edgemar.
It is a way to flesh out whether the actor has thoroughly explored all of the life facts about his character.
If I were to ask you any question about your life, concerning all the moments you remember, you would be able to answer it, because you are you.
The same should then apply if you are Hamlet or Clark Kent or Norman Bates or Vito Corleone or Travis Bickle or Harry Potter.
Or Scarlett O'Hara or Nurse Ratched or Clarice Starling or Bridget Jones or Katniss Everdeen.
Or in this case, Andy or Wendy, Natalie or Nicola, Patsy or Aubrey, or any of the other characters in this film.
Who are you? What do you want in life? What are all the details from before you were born until now?
It is the taking of the concept of the backstory to its ultimate degree. You know everything about your character--your family, your schooling, your religion, your childhood, your hobbies, your sports, your jobs, your romances, your strengths, your weaknesses, your feelings, your point of view of the world--at each stage and in each year of your life.
It is as if you were the character. Anyone could ask you any question about your character and you would have a ready answer.
Mike Leigh discusses in the commentary track of this film how he spent months with the actors, improvising and rehearsing, carving out and blocking, living the life, living the part, becoming the characters, becoming the family.
Then he sets the camera on a tripod aiming through the framing of a door, and allows the characters to do the moving, in and out, back and forth, as people do in real life--what he calls "comic strip discipline." It is an extraordinary way to work for an actor.
Yet it is not the only way, and it is not always necessary. It can be taken too far, where the research turns into rabbit trails and the exploration turns into indulgence. The goal is to be a real person in each moment, and the results are what matters. In this case the results are a mixture of insightful nuance intermingled with broad sketch comedy. Nicola's snarl, for example, is an actorly affectation, but her moments of vulnerability, her loneliness, fear, and desperation, and the physicality of her illness, are utterly and heart-wrenchingly devastating.
An actor can go his whole career without ever having the opportunity to work with someone like Mike Leigh--outside of acting class--who will give him the time and attention to develop his character, so the actor has to have the resources to work quickly and efficiently. For many roles you are given a single day, and all your preparation must be done on your own. Thus, actors get good at that. Yet they still long for directors who will give them the time to do their craft with excellence. Somewhere in between is a happy medium.
This is a food film.
The camper (British: caravan) may remind you of the food truck in the 2014 Jon Favreau Chef. Leigh says he especially admires four other food films--Juzo Itami's Tampopo (1985), Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987), Marco Fererri's La Grande Bouffe (1973)--so he decided to make one himself.
In addition to two of the lead characters being chefs--and we see the range from a professional industrial kitchen to a wannabe storefront French restaurant to a food truck--the two daughters deal with food coming out each end. The one is bulimic. The other is a plumber.
The family has its challenges. Andy the father procrastinates with home projects, and he is an easy target for his deal-hustling friend Patsy. Wendy the mother does not know how to help her twin daughters, each of whom is at a difficult stage in life. She hides her fears behind compulsive nervous laughter. Natalie, the "responsible" one, has finally found a job she enjoys, as a plumber, but she struggles socially. Nicola struggles with low self-esteem, self-doubt, and self-hatred, and she takes it out on the world, insulting and abusing her parents, her sister, and her boyfriend--or rather, her sex partner. He eventually gives up because she will not open herself to him emotionally or intellectually.
They have another friend, Aubrey, who cannot decide whether he loves Nicola or her mother or both, and who chases a hopeless dream of running a French restaurant patterned after the world portrayed in Edith Piaf songs. He is administratively clueless and as much a procrastinator in business as Andy is at home, but he does seem to be a proficient chef, albeit with a planned menu of dishes few people would want to eat.
Wendy works as a dance instructor for young girls and in a clothing store for toddlers. She mentions more than once that she misses the days when her daughters were babies, when they were innocent and sweet and she knew how to take care of them. She seems to use her jobs as a refuge where she can still maintain the feeling of being a good mother.
The family members go through their suburban weekend, trying to find ways of coping in a cursed world. Andy is faithful, and as much as he procrastinates and chases folly at home he works hard in his professional life as a master chef, and he provides for his family in the best way he knows how. Wendy loves and accepts her daughters unconditionally, despite her inability to understand them or to control her own tongue when speaking to them, and she ends up being the emotional glue that holds them all together. Nicola's self-loathing comes to a head when conversations with her boyfriend, her sister, and her mother all demand that she begin to be honest with herself.
In the end, after a lot of laughter and tears, maybe this family will be okay.
* * * * *
Your Unprinted Menu at The Regret Rien
(Note that the restaurant's name comes from a 1956 Edith Piaf song, "Non, je ne regrette rien.")
Order when you're ready!
--Hors d'Oeuvres--
Tripe souffle
Kidney vol-au-vent - with a whole kidney
King prawn in jam sauce - with just one prawn
Chilled brains - They speak for themselves.
Prune quiche.
Black pudding and Camembert soup
Boiled bacon consomme
Saveloy on a bed of lchees
--Entrees--
Pork cyst
Duck in chocolate sauce
Tongues in rhubarb hollandaise
Liver in lager
Clams in ham - with a pan-friend cockle-based sauce
Quails on a bed of spinach with treacle
Grilled trotters with eggs over easy
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