in the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery:
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SYNOPSES |  |
It's 1884, and Gilbert and
Sullivan need a hit. Princess Ida is just not doing the sort of business they're used to.
But Sullivan (Corduner) wants to write something more serious than comic operettas. And
Gilbert (Broadbent) keeps trying to recycle stale story lines that his collaborator (and
the critics) dismiss. Their solution to this problem--based on Gilbert's chance encounter
with Japanese culture at a London exhibition--turns out to be The Mikado. And Mike Leigh's
movie about mounting that best of all G. & S. works turns out to be one of the year's
more beguiling surprises. It is not at all the sort of thing one expects from Leigh, the
very sober creator of films like Naked and Secrets and Lies, for it is basically the
story--somewhat comic, somewhat desperate, very carefully detailed--of rehearsing and
putting on the operetta. 
What gives Topsy-Turvy its heartfelt heft is the way in which it
shows how this process takes over everyone's life--eventually driving out all
distractions, whether they be Gordon's defeat at Khartoum, the sterilities of Gilbert's
marriage or the many anxious neuroses of the acting company. It is show biz as therapy,
with all tensions temporarily resolved when the show is a hit. But there is also a sense
of real, very Mike Leighish, life in this film that darkens and transforms it. And
transfixes us.
-Richard Schickel, Time
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