Critic's Notebook

Mike Leigh directs a topsy-turvy world

If any one thing unites the 22 winners so far of the SF Film Society’s Founder’s Directing Award, it’s that they’re all unique cinematic voices whose signature viewpoints and styles could never be mistaken for another’s. Akira Kurosawa (for whom the award was originally named), Michael Powell, Robert Bresson, Jiri Menzel, Francesco Rosi, Im Kwon-Taek, Arturo Ripstein, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Altman, Werner Herzog, Spike Lee—these are the kinds of talents that term "auteur" fits like a glove, as their directorial personalities are manifest in every frame, in every film. (The list’s only partial exceptions are, curiously, a few other Americans including Eastwood, Penn, Mankiewicz and Donen—superb craftsmen who’ve often subsumed a personal touch in service to the subject at hand.)

Over four decades as a writer-director whose film, TV and stage work have created a distinctive ongoing insider’s portrait of working-to-middle class English life, Mike Leigh now seems a natural 23rd addition to that lofty roll call. His each new movie or play is a cultural event—OK, not a pop-culture event, but one exported to arthouses and theatres around the world. His initial rise during the late 1980s must have galled Thatcherites who’d have preferred British cinema to be represented by Merchant-Ivory-style sumptuous nostalgia—not Leigh’s grotty, funny, barbed extensions of the "Angry Young Man" anti-nostalgic tradition.

topics: british cinema, critics, directors, san francisco international film festival