Life Is Sweet

1990 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Nope. I don't want to do a plot synopsis for this one.

"You take my word for it--that is an evil spoon."

After what might be the worst title screen I've ever seen--bold letters that look like they were cut out for an elementary school bulletin board--things pick up immediately with a shot of bored dancing children.

From Alison Steadman's relentless laughter after every one of her lines to the saw-and-accordion-heavy score, this movie kept threatening to irritate me, but I ended up liking it a lot. Actually, who am I kidding? I love both the singing saw and the accordion. The characters are easy to embrace, despite their faults that make them unlikable. In fact, you almost like them more because of those flaws. You can at least identify with them more easily. The characters remind me of English-speaking Kaurismaki characters, but that might just be because nobody but the characters really exist in the world of the movie. That might be the reason why nobody comes to Aubrey's restaurant opening. There's an effervescence with these characters that make them, even when they're wallowing in despair, fun to spend the movie time with. The tone is consistently buoyant.

Life Is Sweet has a great cast. Timothy Spall is the funniest as Aubrey, the wannabe restaurateur who, despite failing about as spectacularly as a restaurateur can fail, does seem to almost know what he's doing. It doesn't stop him from decorating his restaurant with frozen fish in a tank, a severed cat head, a bird cage that is supposed to symbolize sparrows, and broken accordions. Stephen Rea plays a family friend, the guy who sells the father the dilapidated food truck, and he's a character who doesn't seem capable of convincing anybody that he's sober. Jim Broadbent and Steadman are great as the parents, both just worn down enough from giving life a moderate effort. And the twin sisters, who look nearly identical even if their personalities are completely different, are played by Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks. They don't have rapport as much as they clash perfectly, working as foils for each other in a way. David Thewlis also plays a gum-chomping boyfriend, just a few years before his standout performance in Naked.

I need to catch up on Mike Leigh films as I like the cut of his jib.