Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: 87* Mike Leigh In Focus (JP)
Description: In nearly 50 years of filmmaking, British director Mike Leigh has ranged from comic portrayals of ordinary life amid the social breakdowns of Thatcherâs Britain (Life is Sweet, High Hopes) to gritty renditions of working-class constraint and bourgeois hypocrisy (Meantime, Abigailâs Party, Hard Labour) to period films that reveal the âprofoundly trivialâ elements of artistic life even two centuries in the past (Topsy-Turvy, Mr. Turner).Leigh contains multitudes. What Roland Barthes says about the novels of Marcel Proust is true of Mike Leigh films as well: you notice different things every time you return to them.In this C...