Peterloo Directed by Mike Leigh
Peterloo
Directed by Mike Leigh
Starrings: Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, Pearce Quigley, David Moorst, Rachel Finnegan, Tom Meredith, Simona Bitmate, Robert Wilfort, Karl Johnson, Sam Troughton, Roger Sloman, Kenneth Hadley, Tom Edward-Kane, Lizzy McInnerny, Alastair Mackenzie, Neil Bell, Lisa Millett, Philip Jackson, John-Paul Hurley, Tom Gill, Lizzie Frain, Harry Hepple, Ian Mercer, Adam Long, Nico Mirallegro, Danny Kirrane, Johnny Byrom, Victor McGuire, Stephen Wight, Ryan Pope, Dorothy Atkinson, Tim McInnerny, Marion Bailey, Vincent Franklin, Jeff Rawle, Eileen Davies, Philip Whitchurch, Martin Savage, Al Weaver, David Bamber, Paul Day, David Fielder, Fine Time Fontayne, Robert Gillespie, Jonathan Jaynes, Nicholas Lumley, Shaun Prendergast, Alan Williams, Dorothy Duffy, Victoria Moseley, Joseph Kloska, Leo Bill, Brian Fletcher, Gary Cargill, Patrick Kennedy, Guy Williams
Year: 2018
Country: UK
Author Review: Roberto Matteucci
Click Here for Italian Version
"Did you see Napoleon?"
Waterloo, June 18, 1815, the Prussian and English troops commanded by the Duke of Wellington definitively defeated Napoleon Bonaparte.
At the end of the battle, the winning soldiers began the long travel to come back home. Among them was John Leeds. It was a slow, sad return to Oldham, in Lancashire near Manchester.
In Waterloo, he was wounded, shocked, scared in the heart by atrocities, but he was safe. He will not have the same fortune four years later when the swords of the same British army, he had faithfully served in Belgium, assassinated him.
On August 16, 1819, on a space called St. Peter's Field in Manchester, a radical gathering was held in opposition to the political and economic situation. Just to the upper and rich class could vote, elected the deputies of the region, excluding other social categories. Moreover, the economic crisis was starving the population; industrial development eliminated many men from the world of work.
About sixty thousand people peacefully gathered to listen to the speakers. They were attacked by the Yeomanry, by the hussars, it was a massacre with dead, wounded and many arrests, all civilian. Among them was John Leeds, safe in Waterloo and killed at Peterloo, so called it approaching the two names, the slaughter at St. Peter's Field.
An unknown historical episode even in Great Britain. The expert director Mike Leigh transforms this historic event in the film Peterloo presented at the 75th Venice Film Festival.
"This film has nothing to do with nostalgia. It is not a melancholy film, nostalgic, which tries to go back to the past. It is about people and our needs as human beings. Then, the speech as a demonstration is not dead at all, yet people are able to make beautiful speeches, but they articulate in a different way thanks to the media, technology ... I do not agree at all, it is not disappeared." (1)
Mike Leigh follows his style, avoids nostalgia but creates a clearly political film, with smart underlining of language.
Some historians have this idea about Peterloo:
“There are two points about Peterloo which have, somehow, become lost in recent accounts. The first is the actual bloody violence of the day. It really was a massacre … The presence of so many women and children was overwhelming testimony to the pacific character of the meeting which (the reformers knew) all England was watching. The attack was made on this multitude with the venom of panic.
But the panic was not (as has been suggested) the panic of bad horsemen hemmed in by a crowd. It was the panic of class hatred. It was the Yeomanry – the Manchester manufactures, merchants, publicans, and shopkeepers on horseback – which did more damage than the regulars. (Hussars) … There is no term for this but class war. But it was a pitifully one-sided war. ...” (2)
Peterloo was a class struggle, a clash between different social lives. They were the first signs of socialism, which will be studied and philosophized by Karl Marx a few decades later.
Starting from these principles, the author analyses all phases of moments before and after, creating, as it should be, a choral story, a vision from the proletariat, with numerous characters, with an exact and precise duality.
The dichotomy is in the atmospheres, in the formal and historical continuity.
The beginning obviously concerns Waterloo. A scene of war with dead, injured, laments; a trumpeter - John Leeds - is upset by carnage, looks around, only blood, does not know how to behave, so he instinctively takes the trumpet and plays; we do not know for whom, but he plays. The next framing is an obvious close-up until a bomb exploded near him. He finds himself with a bloody face, dazed, he does not hear well any more.
The trip is in the framing of the few survivors, they walk in single file sad and without speaking. Yet they won, they are the winners against the terrible enemy Napoleon.
The first dissonance is in the next sequence; is a session of the House of Lords, they decided a high income in favour of the Duke of Wellington for defeating Bonaparte. Also the soldier John won like the Duke, but the human and social difference is striking. One comes home destroyed and the other like a hero.
General Byng was one of the officers in the service of Wellington. He was also rewarded with a prestigious command in Manchester.
John arrives in Oldham, still wears the riven army uniform, he never takes it off. The family receive him with affection but must face a difficult economic conjuncture for the industrialization of the textile industry. He will walk desperately under the rain, looking in vain for an occupation.
Before the final battle, there is a constant growth of many protagonists, both between the radicals and the conservatives.
Among the progressives, there are two divergent visions. Many progressive are rich bourgeois or intellectuals. The inequality between them is evident, underlined by the differences in the speeches, in the high-sounding letters, and in the rhetoric full of metaphors.
He skilfully works about the characters; above all, he wants to humiliate them, in degrading them like human caricatures. These thoughts are transparent in many scenes.
The most important happens in court. In front of a sadistic magistrate appears a parade of many defendants, all with the same charge. The judges have a stupid joyful aspect, ironically shoots from the bottom while showing contempt for the indicted. In reality, they are only desperation cases, they are too poor and hungry: "I condemn you to deportation to Australia."
Mike Leigh is a convinced republican, and without pity shoots in a few scenes the disgusting image of the Crown and his direct participation in the massacre. It is an easy game, even historically speaking. The prince regent at the time was the future King, George IV. The father was insane. He drunk a lot of alcohol, he was obese because eating much, they were the cause of his dead.
He has shot from a carriage greeting with a strange face, full of haughtiness for the people. They insult him for his human and political negativity.
In the end, the prince regent is shown as an idiot, a clown but conscious and strong-willed in ordering the death of subject and legislate severe laws of repression the turmoil. Alongside there is the wife more repugnant in gestures and words of him.
It is not described better even the radical leader Henry Hunt. It is irritating, superb; he looks disgusted in the house in which he is housed with kindness because he does not have all the comforts of his bourgeois life.
The last scene is action, an attack on civilians, an act of terrorism. No one worked that day, it is a collective holiday, and everyone is dressed well, elegant, marching in groups with music and flags. However, the last description of disgust is to General Byng. He could not be in Peterloo to command personally the army. He said he had to have an important commitment. Instead, we see him, at the same time of the charge of the cavalry, to bet on a horse race. The worst of the worst.
The film has a structure, observes the story clearly, directly, without fear. Yet the film was rejected by both the Cannes and New York festivals before arriving in Venice:
“David Walsh: I think it’s a tremendous film. I was astonished to hear that the Cannes film festival turned it down.
Mike Leigh: There are many theories. But mine is the most straightforward. It’s not a red-carpet film. There are no stars; it’s not very sexy. Frankly, I don’t care. ...
ML: We did what we always do, including working very hard to get excellent French subtitles. It’s not arrogance, but we assumed we would be in Cannes. Then the word started to come back that there was an issue, and they said, no. ‘We respect the film, but it’s not for us.’
What I found far more upsetting and disappointing was that it was rejected by the New York film festival. Because almost every one of the films I’ve made, with perhaps one or two exceptions, has been in that festival. I was pretty cross about that.” (3)
There is something strange. According to the director, Peterloo was refused because: "It's not a red-carpet film. There are no stars; It's not very sexy." Also previous Leigh films, participants and winners in festivals all over the world, did not have any stars or sexy stories. Only in the mind of Thierry Frémaux are the reasons for the rejection of Cannes but certainly his choice was not wrong.
(1) https://www.sentieriselvaggi.it/venezia75-peterloo-incontro-con-mike-leigh-e-maxine-peake/
(2) Robert Walmsley, Peterloo: The Case Reopened, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1969
(3) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/28/inte-s28.html
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