Topsy-Turvy

A radical departure for the great chronicler of contemporary working-class Britain, Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy (1999) is a lavish period piece about Gilbert and Sullivan that won two Academy Awards and competed at Venice. It applied Leigh's famous improvisatory, character-first method to the Victorian theatre, with exhilarating results.

Jim Broadbent plays the prickly, repressed Gilbert and Allan Corduner the genial, ailing Sullivan, as the film charts the creative impasse that nearly ended their partnership and the burst of inspiration that produced The Mikado. Leigh devotes loving attention to the unglamorous labour of art — rehearsals, costume fittings, backstage anxieties, the egos of performers — and stages substantial passages of the operetta itself. Beneath the period splendour run his perennial concerns: marriage, illness, addiction and the loneliness of creative people.

Critics regarded it as one of Leigh's finest films and one of the most intelligent movies ever made about the messy business of making art. Sumptuous, funny and quietly melancholy, Topsy-Turvy demonstrated that Leigh's gift for human truth could flourish far outside his usual milieu. It remains a singular achievement — a backstage musical with the texture of real life and the wit of its illustrious subjects. Broadbent and Corduner anchor a film widely regarded as among the most intelligent ever made about the messy business of creating art, proving Leigh's gift for human truth could flourish far outside his usual milieu.