I should have watched it twenty years ago—or maybe not. I am not sure whether it’s more exciting or scary to see my life dissected to this level of insight and different pieces of me projected onto various fictional characters—my own nightmares, ambitions, mental health extravagances, even the spectacle frames I used to wear in my John Lennon phase. Funny. Art always knows us better than we could ever do, but it still feels uneasy to discover how literal that knowledge can be.
‘There is an Aubrey in all of us,’ says Mike Leigh. ‘He is desperately sad. He really has all the aspirations, but his fear renders him dysfunctional.’¹ So true, I am afraid, and yet there’s a deep sense of love and optimism to Tim Spall’s extravagant character. He is the one who tries for real. And yes he fails, but no matter, because we all know that he’ll try again, fail again, and fail better.
However dealing once more with the controversial side of Margaret Thatcher’s complicated years (by then close to resigning, with that setting an end to her third and final term) Life is Sweet leaves the sociopolitical cause in the background to bite instead into the faceted intersections between private and family dynamics. Fascinating how Mike Leigh gradually dares beyond the cheerfulness of the film’s perpetually sunny days making of food, whether industrial, exotic or junk, a clever central thread in the dramatisation of the different forms of struggle on show—and how the message carried is still as timely and vivid as it must have been at the time.

1. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).