In Mike Leigh's 1999 Topsy Turvy, operetta composers Gilbert and Sullivan are at odds. Their long and successful collaboration has soured. While researching The Mikado, Gilbert meets a Japanese princess living in exile in London. Gilbert, a married man who is an irascible sort, falls in love with the girl, but, as a good Victorian husband, he represses his tender feelings. The princess is courted by the rakish and decadent Arthur Sullivan, Sullivan's interest in the young woman leads to violent quarrels between the two partners, fistfights, and puts the completion of The Mikado in question. Sensing that her presence has sown discord between the two great artists, the Japanese girl, who now loves them both, returns to Japan where she commits hari kari. Heart-broken, the two men return to their collaboration and produce several gorgeous songs dedicated the memory of their lost love. -- This is not the plot of Leigh's film, but represents the way that Hollywood scriptwriters would have designed a story about the composition of The Mikado. Conventional biopics get most of the facts wrong while enhancing the credibility of their storytelling with exquisitely realized details as to the High Victorian milieu. Watching Leigh's Topsy Turvy, one has the sense that the movie exists, not for its plot (which is negligible) but to present the audience with a wealth of carefully researched documentary details about Victorian operetta and the lives of its two most outstanding practitioners, the librettist, W.S. Gilbert and his composer, Arthur Sullivan. This is a peculiar, materialist approach to film making, more like a lush version of Straub and Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach or a scrupulously Marxist film on the order of Peter Watkin's documentary-style Edvard Munch than like a conventional Hollywood biopic. In his commentary on Topsy Turvy, Leigh says without embarrassment that the film is "the most carefully researched movie ever made" and apologizes at length for the only "howler" that made its way into the finished picture -- a derisive statement about someone going "to Oslo to see Mr. Ibsen"; in 1885, Oslo was called Kristiana. The question that the picture poses is whether its wealth of fanatically researched period detail suffocates the picture or enhances the extraordinary character studies that are at its heart. In some respects, the film's refusal to supply a conventional plot and its sprawling documentary detail are baffling -- Leigh doesn't reach the principal theme in the film, the collaborative effort that produced The Mikado, until one hour and nine minutes have elapsed in a movie that runs two hours and forty minutes. Furthermore, the film is relentlessly claustrophobic -- it is entirely shot inside voluptuously accoutered Victorian rooms with colorful sequences replicating operetta performances in a lavishly reconstructed 19th century theater, D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theater. Only a single brief shot purports to show an exterior and, late in the film, when Gilbert flees the theater and encounters a mad-woman in an alleyway, the imagery has a nightmarish subterranean quality. An example of the film's peculiar approach to its material is when D'Oyly Carte travels to Paris where Sullivan is hiding out to avoid working on Gilbert's libretto. Leigh has recreated a Parisian restaurant of the era down to the tiniest detail. In the commentary, he advises that he recruited French expatriates to populate his Parisian restaurant -- this are people in the background who don't speak in the scene. The waiter is an actual French waiter. We expect the scene to be about D'Oyly Carte pleading with Sullivan to return to London to write music for Gilbert's libretto. But, instead, Carte pitches an investment scheme to Sullivan, describes that investment, his new proposed Savoy Hotel with particular emphasis on its seventy in-room bathrooms (a detail that astounds Sullivan) and, then, has the composer sign a contract about the hotel venture using a brand-new innovation, "the reservoir pen" (or "fountain pen"). In the end, the scene turns out to be about the detailed reconstruction of an 1880's Parisian restaurant, the notion of putting private baths in hotel rooms, and the invention of the fountain pen. The sequence doesn't contribute in any substantive way to the film's meager narrative and seems wholly unnecessary -- there's no follow-up to anything discussed in the sequence. And, yet, the scene is intrinsically fascinating, beautiful designed and shot, hyper-realistic, and, even, intriguing in an abstract, historical sort of way -- and this is the enigma that the movie presents, it doesn't feel long despite lasting almost three hours, and the viewer remains interested in the proceedings, even immensely interested, although nothing much seems to be going on and despite the absence of any discernible narrative. (The film is similar in perspective and documentation to Leigh's later Mr. Turner about the great landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, although that film is very much made in the plein air.)
The general premise of Topsy Turvy is that the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan has reached an impasse. Reviews of the two men's most recent effort, Princess Ida, are respectful and favorable, but suggest that the partners' work has grown stale and that they are merely repeating themselves. D'Oyly Carte has them under a contract and demands a new work. Sullivan, who is a sort of Victorian rake, decamps to Paris where he enjoys an evening in a brothel -- the sexual aspects of Leigh's film are as carefully researched as the details relating to Victorian medicine and knick-knacks. Sullivan has a languorous American mistress but seems to have fragile health -- he spends a good part of the movie sick and in-bed. Gilbert has composed a new libretto involving Sicilian brigands but it's just a retread of earlier plots that he has devised. The two men meet (they are together on screen for only a few minutes) and discuss the libretto while chewing on lumps of sugar. Sullivan desires to write a serious opera or a symphony and is not interested in Gilbert's libretto. A heat wave has emptied out the theaters and ended the run of Princess Ida. Carte, who needs something to show, revives an earlier Gilbert and Sullivan hit, The Sorcerer, and Leigh shows us an extended excerpt of that production, primarily, it seems, to highlight the director's research as to Victorian lighting effects and stagecraft. Just when it seems that the collaboration is at an end, Gilbert's wife takes him to an exhibition in which a "authentic" Japanese village is recreated, complete with Japanese people performing like apes in a cage. Gilbert is fascinated, buys a samurai sword, and, then, when the sword that he has lovingly hung on the wall of his den falls to the ground, imagines The Mikado. From this point forward, the film alternates between spectacularly staged sequences from the operetta and scenes showing the two men rehearsing the actors and musicians. The last hour of the movie which depicts how The Mikado was produced is remarkably engaging -- we are privy to all sorts of fascinating information about the business and technology of late 19th century theater. A tiny plot even emerges in last twenty minutes or so -- Gilbert doesn't like the Lord High Executioner's song, the famous melody about the "punishment fitting the crime." And,so, he eliminates the number from the production. The great Timothy Spall plays the actor, Richard Temple, who, in turn, is assigned the role of the Lord High Executioner. He bursts into tears when his showcase number is cut from the show. The chorus, however, protests the excision of the piece to Gilbert, running the risk that he will fire and blacklist them. Gilbert seems moved by the chorus' determination to save the number, primarily, it seems, out of their sympathy for the actor playing the role. And, so, he allows the song to remain in The Mikado -- it is, of course, now regarded as one of the highlights of the show. The opening night is a great success. The film ends with a dying fall, focusing on three of the women at the edges of the action -- Gilbert's wife longs for a child and tries to seduce her husband into bed with her, but he's distracted, full of self-loathing and melancholy, and rebuffs her. This scene involves Gilbert telling his wife: "There's something intrinsically disappointing about success", a strange notion that, nonetheless, is both central to the film and an important commentary on art in general. (I have recalled this line for more than 20 years after seeing the picture at the Uptown Theater when it was first released.) We see Sullivan in bed with his mistress, neurasthenic, and dreading the exertions of the next score that he will have to write with Gilbert -- success has insured that he will now be yoked to Gilbert for the next ten years. Using euphemisms, Gilbert's mistress sadly tells him that "demon has returned", meaning that she is pregnant -- there's no debate about what this means; Gilbert says that he will arrange for things, but the woman says that she has "already taken care of the arrangements." Finally, an actress who seems to be an alcoholic sits with her colleague in her dressing room -- she's not supposed to be drinking or smoking, but she does both. The woman with her has some kind of injury to her leg and it isn't getting any better -- there are distinct limitations to Victorian medical science. The movie ends with a melancholy, if beautiful, scene from The Mikado, the alcoholic actress singing the aria "The moon and I". This conclusion exemplifies the peculiarities in the film -- the alcoholic actress is not an important character although we know a few things about her: she is a widow, has a little boy named Winston, and, probably, will not re-marry because most eligible men of that era don't want as a wife a woman who has already had a child. The woman seems very sad and her final aria is exact to the tone of loss and melancholy that the film's ending embodies -- but there isn't any plot or narrative rationale for the picture ending with images of this minor, if indelible, character. The sequence exists for its expressive tone -- not for any plot significance that it might have.
Leigh improvises scenes in his films with his collaborators, a repertoire company of actors with whom he customarily works. Accordingly, the notion of collaboration and how people work together to make theater is crucial to him and the subject of the film seems dear to his heart. The acting in superb. Allan Corduner's performance as Sullivan is pitch-perfect, a strange mixture of libertine and sentimentalist, and Jim Broadbent is beyond reproach as the curmudgeonly and pessimistic Gilbert. All of the characters, down to the very slightest (for instance, Shrimp, the stage-boy) are brilliantly realized. There is a startling scene about an hour after the film's start in which a very old man has a kind of seizure, screaming at imaginary horrors -- the old man is Gilbert's father and the sequence is astonishing. But it has no outcome and seems unrelated to anything else in the movie, although Leigh in his commentary assures us that this event actually occurred. Leigh goes so far as to consult with medical doctors to diagnose the ailments of the characters in the movie -- one actress, he notes, seems to suffer from "varicosity" in the veins of her leg. If the picture has an overarching theme, it can be summarized in an anecdote sometimes said to apply to the great clown, Grimaldi, or sometimes told about Pagliacci. A man goes to a doctor and says that he is terribly depressed and suffering great and crippling melancholy. The doctor tells the man that he should go to the theater and see the great clown, Grimaldi, performing. "This man will make you laugh," the doctors assures his patient, "and forget all of your troubles at least while you are watching him". The patient, then, cries out: "But doctor, I am Grimaldi." The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan have inspired millions of people and made them happy. But, like all other human endeavors, they are rooted in human discontent and unhappiness.
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