I have never been a natural fan of British films like the Merchant-Ivory series, or Brideshead Revisited. My Irish self has always bridled at the genteel touch.
So I was surprised to find myself in a sort of movie-going rapture watching Mike Leigh's Topsy Turvy, about the making of Gilbert and Sullivan's opera The Mikado.
It's a movie about the Victorian era, focusing on a late-career squabble between troubled librettist William Gilbert and untroubled composer Arthur Sullivan.
Sullivan wants to quit the partnership because his muse is calling him to purer work than HMS Pinafore -- symphonies and such. He is a lover of life, determined to try something new, and modernly in touch with all his feelings.
Gilbert, by contrast, is a mess -- stuffily proud of his story lines, which Sullivan points out always seem to involve a magic wand or ampule or potion, but unable to express himself beyond the autocratic confines of his writings.
He is especially furious that a reviewer of his last play mocked him for the "topsy-turvyness" -- his tendency to go Alice-in-Wonderland silly in his plots.
Their partnership is on the brink of shipwreck when Gilbert attends an exhibition of Japanese arts. Intrigued, he witnesses samurai fighting, tea ceremonies, and the face-making stylistics of Noh theatre.
The key moment in the movie for me happens that night. Home from the exposition, challenged by his producers to give Sullivan a story with greater depth, he sees -- and the audiences sees him see -- the possibilities of a perfectly British adaptation of Japanese culture.
The camera approaches him from below chin level, then looks up to see, like a lover, the idea jazzing in his eyes. I was writhing in my seat at this glorious picture of creativity.
That shot is like an umbrella that the rest of the picture scurries around under. You are shown how the prospects of technological change were delighting the forward thinking Britons.
There is a hilarious scene of Gilbert talking to his booking agent on a very early telephone, shouting polite, unnecessary messages, "I AM SPEAKING TO YOU ON THE TELEPHONE!" into the wires.
At another point, a businessman hands Sullivan his first fountain pen. "It's a new kind of pen that contains its own reservoir," he explains. Sullivan puts nib to paper and smiles with pleasure as his signature glides into existence. The ink was inside the pen!
Not everyone benefits from newness. Gilbert's aged father endures an evening in the London damp because he is afraid he will die if he pushes the electric doorbell button to be let in.
It is a movie about learning, in which every character has a luminous moment. Two jingoistic actors decry the uncivilized killing of the hero general George Gordon in Ethiopia by the Great Mahdi. A Scots actor asks them if they feel the same about the report of the killings of Irish families by their own civilized troops.
This same Scotsman bristles later, as he is tailored in Japanese garments, and his own innate Britishism won't allow him to show the contour of his calves onstage. Obscene, declares the man who on any given Sunday wears a kilt and nothing under.
At another point a rotund actor, playing the Mikado himself, has his big song excised the eve of performance. Going against all theatrical tradition, and against the imperious Gilbert's will, the actors meet with him in a stairwell and plead their fellow's case. To their surprise, Gilbert, who has by now overcome his own insufferable British certitude, relents and restores the aria. And a thing unheard of, floret of democracy, sprouts at the Savoy Theater.
It is a splendid story of a pair of geniuses who had made a great career of satirizing British ways, hitting a tired patch and summoning the inspiration to start over.
Sullivan is certain the listening public is anxious not for more fun and frolic and the most wonderful, most joyous trilling this side of Mozart, but for a staid symphony. (Think: Lloyd Webber's stilted classical forays, or worse, Sir Paul McCartney's.)
And poor Gilbert. He is horrified by the demise of his father, beaten down by the hatefulness of his mother ("Never have a baby with a sense of humor!"), unable to express even the simplest direct emotion to a sweet and affecting wife, and now threatened by a partner who wants to pack up and leave.
Poor, constricted, flightless William Gilbert in his moment of woe reaches down and fetches forth the most wonderful story yet -- of Nankypoo, and the Grand Poobah, and the three tittering schoolgirls. Japanese on the surface, but scratch it, and it's a more familiar island empire.
Lessons for us all. As Sullivan's mistress says of the endless possibilities, rolling her eyes and smiling, "After all, it's 1895."
