Life Is Sweet (film)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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. The, by turns, tragi-comic story follows the fortunes of a working-class North London family over a few weeks one summer.
Plot
Andy, a senior chef in a large London catering facility, buys a dilapidated fast-food van from a disreputable acquaintance named Patsy. He plans to clean, restore and put it into service on a local fast-food round. Wendy, his hard-working, good-natured and innuendo-prone wife, is sensibly skeptical 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 at night, an anguished Nicola binges on chocolate and snacks, then forces herself to vomit. Natalie, awake in the next room, overhears her.
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. He ultimately loses patience with her, accusing her of being "a bit vacant" and incapable of having a sincere, adult conversation or allowing herself to enjoy his companionship. She calls his bluff and loses: Frustrated but resolute, he leaves her and her fragile emotional state deteriorates further.
The opening night of The Regret Rien is a disaster. Wendy volunteers her help when it becomes clear that Aubrey's waitress has let him down; she has gone to Prague with her boyfriend. Aubrey forgot to advertise the opening of the restaurant, with the result that no customers turn up. Aubrey gets hopelessly drunk, takes to the pavement and rails against the world, tells Wendy that he fancies her, starts taking his clothes off, and passes out, 'a quivering, sobbing gelatinous blob of disappointment.'<ref>Coveney, p. 221.</ref> Wendy is forced 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 from the disastrous opening night of Aubrey's restaurant 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 U.S. 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. The brittle behavioural armour that Nicola has protected her psyche with is now shattered, and she 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. She works in a baby-clothing shop and teaches a dance class to young children. She is the emotional core of the family and talks continually, keeping up an amused running commentary on everything around her, but concerned about the welfare of her family, especially her troubled daughter Nicola. She loves her husband, but recognises that he lacks entrepreneurial spirit; she describes him as having "two speeds, slow and stop".
- Jim Broadbent as Andy, Wendy's husband and a professional head cook in an industrial kitchen. Andy is presented as a loving but slightly ineffectual husband and father, fond of tinkering in his shed and buying broken things which he plans to get around to fixing at some unspecified future date. By contrast, the scenes depicting Andy at work show him as a highly competent executive chef.
- Claire Skinner as Natalie, Andy and Wendy's daughter, a plumber who spends her leisure time playing pool and drinking with her male workmates. She never shows any interest in dating or romance, but reads travel brochures about the United States in her room at night. Natalie is described by her mother as "happy", but she is the only principal character in the film who never smiles.
- Jane Horrocks as Nicola, Natalie's twin sister. Nicola refuses to work for ideological reasons, is extremely thin, smokes continually, eats her meals separately from the others and criticises the behaviour of everyone around her, largely on the grounds of a superficial kind of political correctness. Her favourite expression is "Bollocks!" It is revealed early on that Nicola is bulimic; she keeps a locked suitcase full of snacks and sweets under her bed, and late at night she binges on them and then makes herself vomit.
- Timothy Spall as Aubrey, an old friend of the family. Aubrey is nervous, fidgety and has poor impulse control, often randomly destroying nearby objects; the other way he vents his tensions is by playing the drums very badly. He considers himself a culinary "genius", but his cooking is eccentric to the point of inedible, and he lacks many basic social skills; early in the film he visits Wendy on the pretext of giving her a pineapple which he suspects to be "on the turn", all the while pummelling it between his hands as if it were an American football. He appears to harbour unrequited lusts for both Wendy and Nicola.
