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Directed
by Mike Leigh (2018)
The
first duty of a film-maker is to create an imaginary world which we can
happily inhabit for a couple of hours before we emerge from the cinema,
blinking at the shock of the real one.
Mike
Leigh achieves this marvellously well in Peterloo, a detailed document
of the eponymous massacre of peaceful demonstrators who, in 1819, had
gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to further the struggle for
the vote.
From
the ranks of weaving machines bristling into the distance, the
beginnings of mass production, to the cramped homes of the working
people, and all populated by an array of sharply-drawn characters, we
are immersed in a convincing portrayal of life 200 years ago. Leigh
gives us everything but the smell. For which omission we probably should
be grateful.
Any
attempt at a realist representation of class struggle must, however,
fall short. There is always an excess that can’t be encompassed by the
camera.
Percy
Shelley’s poem The Masque of Anarchy, written in the wake of Peterloo,
carries the potent line “Ye are many - they are few” and it’s the
‘many’, as a force of history, that’s hard to capture.
Inevitably,
the burden of representing the masses falls on a few shoulders, and much
talking. There are several long scenes of meetings that repeat the
arguments for democracy, and at the time repetition was necessary to
build the movement - but not in a film that could have done with a
vigorous edit.
A
few characters remark on it - “less talk, more action,” says Nellie
(Maxine Peake) – as though Leigh himself worries that he might be
overdoing the rhetoric.
Nellie’s
family of workers does a better job of getting the politics across.
Joseph (David Moorst), her shell-shocked son,is key. Never out of the
jacket we see him wearing in the opening scene on the battlefield at
Waterloo, he runs like a red thread through the picture, stitching
together the bloody victory over Napoleon and, a few years later, the
bloody crushing of a tentative revolt on the home front.
The
powerful connection was made almost immediately, we learn, as
journalists caught up in the carnage come up with the
headlineportmanteau word ‘Peterloo’ to convey the bitter irony of an
army turning on its ‘own’ people.
Joseph
is the archetypal victim, risking his life for the same generalwho was
later to take his life – by proxy, of course, as Sir John Byng (Alastair
Mackenzie) had an urgent appointment at the races that day.
Shelley’s
‘few’, represented in Peterloo by Byng, government ministers, the
ghastly Prince Regent (Tim McInnerny) and a jostling of vindictive
cartoonish magistrates, are a gift for Leigh, a cast of comic and
frighteningly dangerous grotesques parading dodgy hairdos much as their
class (and very likely actual) descendants do today (think Boris Johnson
and Jacob Rees-Mogg).
Henry
‘Orator’ Huntmight be on the right side of history, but the white-hatted
gentleman campaigner for reform also comes off badly in the hands of
Rory Kinnear who plays him as so far up himself he almost turns inside
out.
If
there is hope, it lies with the working people who gathered that day,
defeated in a battle they could never win, but strengthened for the war
ahead. By the end of Peterloo the dusty field is deserted by all but the
corpses, but it stands as a symbol not just of the
brutality of the few, but of the potential of the many that they fear.
November
7, 2018
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