Life is Sweet (1990)

“Watching this movie made me realise how boring and thin many movies are; how they substitute plots for the fascinations of life.” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1991 Life Is Sweet was Mike Leigh’s third film for cinema in the first two decades of a directing career spent primarily in television and the theatre. The script, devised through his famed improvisatory process, mixes food-related incidents: the opening of a restaurant, the purchase of a burger van, and the revelation of a young woman’s bulimia. Through apparently humdrum struggles the film’s suburban Londoners, Jim Broadbent, Leigh’s then-wife Alison Steadman and their chalk-and-cheese adult twins Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner, reveal hidden strengths. This was Leigh’s first film with director of photography Dick Pope, subsequently a regular collaborator, and also the debut project from Thin Man Productions, which Leigh ran with his producer Simon Channing Williams until the latter’s death in 2009. David Thewlis, who has a small role as the lover of Jane Horrocks’s Nicola, went on to become the focus of Leigh’s next feature, Naked (1993).