Topsy-Turvy

Mike Leigh made his name chronicling contemporary working-class Britain, so Topsy-Turvy (1999), a lavish period piece about Gilbert and Sullivan, was a radical departure. It competed at Venice and won two Academy Awards, and 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, and the film follows the creative impasse that nearly ended their partnership and the burst of inspiration that produced The Mikado. Leigh gives loving attention to the unglamorous labour of art (rehearsals, costume fittings, backstage nerves, the egos of performers) and stages long passages of the operetta itself. Under the period splendour run his usual concerns: marriage, illness, addiction and the loneliness of creative people.

Critics counted it among Leigh's finest work, and it is one of the most intelligent films anyone has made about the messy business of making art. It is sumptuous and funny, with a melancholy running underneath, and it proved that Leigh's gift for human truth could flourish far outside his usual milieu. Anchored by Broadbent and Corduner, Topsy-Turvy amounts to a backstage musical with the texture of real life and a good share of its subjects' wit, and the long rehearsal passages, which a lesser film would have cut, are where much of its pleasure lies.