Well, the aim of posting every day has been broken already. I would argue, however, that New Year's Day is a special case. Our friends who came to stay over the new year left yesterday evening, and the truth is that I did not want to sit down and write the blog afterwards; we just wanted to relax.
We spent the last hours of 2010 and the first hours of 2011 watching Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy on DVD. I must emphasise that this was not my choice! I would have been just as happy to watch one of the many rom-coms and dramas in our collection. One of our guests, J, hadn't seen it before and was intrigued to see what it was like.
It was fascinating to watch again. Like so much of Mike Leigh's work, it is slow-paced and places more emphasis on character than plot. The extracts from The Mikado are lengthy--in my opinion longer than they needed to be. Why, for instance, do we get all three verses of "The Criminal Cried", when it seems to add nothing to our perception of the characters or situation in the film? Jim Broadbent is perfect as Gilbert: the right note of toughness, laconic wit, restrained charm, and inflexibility. The two scenes near the close of the film--Gilbert's wife more than hinting that she wants a baby, with Gilbert refusing to respond; then Sullivan and his lover arranging an abortion--parallel each other by suggesting artistic creation as a substitute for childbirth. I think this is the first time I have noticed the significance of these scenes. Very fanciful, of course; the Gilberts were childless but there is nothing to suggest Gilbert was averse to sex. But little is known of his relationship with his wife and Mike Leigh, naturally, chose to fill in the blanks.
The truth is that Topsy-Turvy has done more for Gilbert and Sullivan than a dozen books can hope to do.
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