Sketching the social spectrum of the time through hilarious vignettes, the first part of High Hopes is sparkling. Characters are quirky, the situations preposterous, and yet its realism is sharp and caustic as a documentary. In Mike Leigh’s words, ‘it’s the only film I’ve made that involves anything you could really call satire, is culpable of caricature, and where the deliberate device is employed of heightening in a comic way some characters against others in order to make an implicit statement.’1
But what really turns High Hopes into a tragicomic masterwork is grandma’s birthday party, where the general hysteria climaxes in an absolutely exhilarating scene of acting and writing bravura. What follows is an unexpected plunge into an even deeper, brutal reflection on the current times and Mike Leigh’s harshest take on Thatcherism thus far. Somehow suggesting that grandma’s point of view coincides with that of the film itself, the final scene on the rooftop is particularly stunning and moving. Her overwhelmed staring look over the city evokes a vivid sense of frustration, defeat, anger, but also projects a certain unexpected positivity onto the whitish sky of London. Perhaps the title is not so sarcastic after all. And by the way, this is the cinema that had a voice.
1. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).
