Life Is Sweet (film)

Life Is Sweet is a 1990 British comedy-drama film directed by Mike Leigh, starring Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks and Timothy Spall. Leigh’s third cinematic film, it was his most commercially successful title at the time of release. A tragi-comic story, it follows the fortunes of a working-class North London family over a few weeks one summer.

Plot

On a hot summer weekend lunchtime, Andy (a senior chef in a large London catering facility) impulsively buys a dilapidated fast-food van touted by a disreputable acquaintance, Patsy, who has unexpectedly called at his home. Andy plans to restore the van for use on a local fast-food round. Wendy, his hard-working, good-natured and innuendo-prone wife, is sensibly sceptical about the project but understands her husband’s ambitions. Their twin 22-year-old daughters (Natalie and Nicola) have profoundly different attitudes: tomboyish Natalie thinks it is a good idea if it will make her father happy, whereas the bitter, shut-in Nicola contemptuously and typically dismisses Andy as a “Capitalist!” Late that night, an anguished Nicola binges on chocolate and snacks, then forces herself to vomit. Natalie, awake in her adjacent bedroom and looking through US travel brochures, overhears: her reactions indicate this is something she is painfully familiar with.

Meanwhile, Aubrey (Timothy Spall) – a hyperactive but emotionally labile family friend – is opening a Parisian-themed restaurant named The Regret Rien. Wendy accepts a part-time job as waitress in the restaurant, but her and Andy’s initial confidence in the scheme is undermined by Aubrey’s unorthodox approach to the interior décor (a cluttered, half-realised combination of outmoded French clichés, such as a bicycle in the bay window, and of tasteless Victoriana, such as a stuffed cat’s head framed by broken accordion sconces) and by his menu. His singularly grotesque interpretation of the excesses of nouvelle cuisine includes dishes such as saveloy on a bed of lychees, liver in lager and pork cyst.

During the afternoon, whilst the rest of the family are out at work, Nicola’s lover comes to the family home to have sex with her. It appears that Nicola only can be aroused by a combination of light bondage and the consumption of chocolate spread from her chest – a practice to which he only reluctantly agrees. Trying to engage and understand her, he ultimately loses patience with her combative attitude, concluding she is “a bit vacant” and incapable of having a sincere, adult conversation or allowing herself to enjoy his companionship. Nicola calls his bluff and loses: frustrated but resolute, he leaves, and her fragile emotional state deteriorates further.

The opening night of The Regret Rien is a disaster. Volunteering her help when Aubrey’s waitress has let him down, Wendy discovers that Aubrey has neglected to advertise the opening, with the result that no customers turn up. Aubrey proceeds to get helplessly drunk, taking to the pavement and railing against the world. Wendy gets him back inside, where Aubrey blubbers that he fancies her, starts to undress and passes out: “a quivering, sobbing gelatinous blob of disappointment”. Wendy has to deal not only with him but with his glum and passive sous-chef/dogsbody Paula.

Meanwhile, Andy and Patsy have gone to their local pub, where Andy gets uncharacteristically but emphatically drunk and ends up sleeping inside the decrepit fast-food van in his driveway. Wendy returns home to find him there. Unnerved by her bizarre evening, she loses her temper with the whole family.

Phlegmatic and dry-humoured Natalie enjoys her unconventional work as a plumber, the simple pleasures of a pint and a game of pool, and dreams of visiting the US. In contrast, the fidgety and isolated Nicola becomes increasingly agitated, aggressive and reclusive, and Wendy finally confronts her. During the course of their long and anguished confrontation, Wendy makes it clear to Nicola that she is deeply worried about her, wondering why she makes no attempt to get involved with the causes she claims to believe. She tells Nicola of the struggle that she and Andy endured to care for their baby daughters – how it meant she never went to college and Andy working in a “job he hates”. It emerges that during an earlier phase of Nicola’s bulimia, she almost starved to death. Ashamed and angry, Nicola is convinced that Wendy and the rest of the family hate her. Instead, as the exasperated Wendy tells her “We don’t hate you! We love you, you stupid girl!” and leaves the room, deeply upset. Nicola breaks down sobbing.

Meanwhile, Andy is seen running his kitchen at work with energy and authority but slips on a spoon, breaking his ankle. Wendy receives the news with a characteristic mixture of sympathy and amusement. She drives him home from the hospital; aided by Natalie she makes him comfortable, and then goes to see Nicola, still in her room. Mother and daughter reconcile.

The film ends with Natalie and Nicola sitting peacefully in the evening sunshine in the back garden. Natalie observes that Nicola must own up to her parents about her bulimia. She then asks Nicola “D’you want some money?” and Nicola accepts gratefully, the first time in the film where she has accepted an offer of help.

Cast

Alison Steadman as Wendy

Jim Broadbent as Andy, Wendy’s husband and a professional head cook in an industrial kitchen

Claire Skinner as Natalie, a plumber and Andy and Wendy’s daughter

Jane Horrocks as Nicola, Natalie’s twin sister

Timothy Spall as Aubrey, an old friend of the family

Stephen Rea as Patsy

David Thewlis as Nicola’s lover

Moya Brady as Paula

Production

The film was a co-production between British Screen Productions, Channel Four Films and Thin Man Films, a production company created by Mike Leigh and producer Simon Channing-Williams. This was the first release by Thin Man, who have produced all Leigh’s films since Life Is Sweet.

The script was developed by Leigh and the cast, employing his established practice of collectively improvising and rehearsing for several weeks before shooting. For example, Aubrey’s bizarre recipes were devised by Leigh and Timothy Spall over the course of an evening, and then checked for plausibility with a professional chef, who advised them about which ones were technically impossible to prepare; all the ones that appear in the film are, as Leigh put it, “all feasible, gross as it sounds.”

David Thewlis, who played Nicola’s anonymous lover, was disappointed at being given such a small role. Leigh promised him that the next time he considered Thewlis for a role in a film “he’d be given a fair slice of the pie.” Thewlis’ next role in a Leigh film was his award-winning performance as the lead character Johnny in Naked.

The film was shot entirely on location in Enfield, UK and used local people as extras, including an Enfield-based dance school for the opening title sequence.

Alison Chitty found the house in Enfield for Life Is Sweet and fell in love with it because of its garden shed. She also found the old mobile snack-bar, which Rea’s Patsy sells on to Broadbent’s Andy as a pig in a poke in Northampton and painted it.

Life is Sweet’s bright, primary-coloured production design contrasted with that of Leigh’s next film, Naked, which was conceived in blacks and blues and a ‘dark, dilapidated grunginess’.

Release

The film had its world premiere on 11 November 1990 at the Lumiere cinema at the London Film Festival. It opened in the United Kingdom on 22 March 1991.

Reception

Critical reception

The film received very favourable reviews, and on Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a rating of 93% from 15 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The Guardian film reviewer awarded the film seven stars out of a possible ten. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was full of praise, commenting that in spite of the constraints of independent film production, the film was “as funny, spontaneous and free as if it had been made on a lark by a millionaire”. He added that “By the end of Life Is Sweet, we are treading close to the stuff of life itself – to the way we all struggle and make do, compromise some of our dreams and insist on the others. Watching this movie made me realize how boring and thin many movies are; how they substitute plots for the fascinations of life.”

Hal Hinson of The Washington Post called the film “sublime” and “gently brilliant”.

Desson Thompson of the same paper agreed, praising Leigh for discovering “the tragic beauty of the mundane”.

David Sexton in the Times Literary Supplement was critical, however, and wrote that “the film never transcends sitcom and remains static and anecdotal, its unit the scene, not the complete story.” Further, he wrote that the film is “the product of an unresolved attitude to its subject matter and in particular of an uneasy relation to questions of class.” Philip French in The Observer countered this idea: “Leigh has been called patronising. The charge is false. The Noël Coward/David Lean film This Happy Breed, evoked by Leigh in several panning shots across suburban back gardens, is patronising. Coward and Lean pat their characters on the back…Leigh shakes them, hugs them, sometimes despairs over them, but never thinks that they are other than versions of ourselves.”

Accolades

Cultural references

Aubrey’s restaurant The Regret Rien is named after the 1956 song “Non, je ne regrette rien” by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire, made famous by French singer Edith Piaf. A framed black-and-white head shot of Piaf hanging on a wall is replaced by a stuffed cat’s head when he shows Wendy and Andy his restaurant before its opening.

In his first appearance in the movie, Aubrey wears a San Francisco Giants Starter jacket while visiting the family’s home.

Andy often speaks in comic voices, at one point uttering the out-of-context line “He’s fallen in the water!”. This was the catchphrase of Little Jim, a recurring character from the 1950s BBC radio comedy programme The Goon Show.

Patsy is a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur football club. According to Leigh, this was a source of some discomfort to Stephen Rea who played the character because Rea is a supporter of the team’s long-term rivals Arsenal.

Home media

Life Is Sweet initially was released on VHS format in the United Kingdom following its theatrical showing, with two subsequent re-releases in 1993 and 2000. It was released on DVD region 2 on 11 February 2002, with a re-release on 17 March 2008. It was made available as part of several DVD collections, including a triple feature DVD alongside Secrets & Lies and Career Girls on 30 September 2002, a double feature DVD again with Secrets & Lies, released on 3 May 2004, and “The Mike Leigh Feature Film Collection” with featured 10 of Leigh’s more successful films on 7 April 2008. The film was released on Blu-ray format in the United Kingdom on 28 May 2012.

Life Is Sweet was released in the United States and Canada on DVD and Blu-ray on 28 May 2013 via The Criterion Collection. The set contains a newly restored 2K transfer with special features, including an audio commentary from Mike Leigh, an audio recording of a 1991 interview with Leigh at the National Film Theatre in London, five short films written and directed by Leigh for the television series Five-Minute Films, a new introduction by Leigh, and a booklet featuring an essay from critic David Sterritt.

The film was released in Australia on DVD region 4 on 7 July 2002 from Shock Records.

See also

BFI Top 100 British films

References

External links

Life Is Sweet at IMDb

Life Is Sweet at Rotten Tomatoes

Life Is Sweet at Box Office Mojo

Life is Sweet at BFI Screenonline

Life Is Sweet: Life Is Bittersweet an essay by David Sterritt at the Criterion Collection

Life Is Sweet at the TCM Movie Database