Leigh Way

fanfair

Where style meets substance

Here are two of the best-kept secrets in the British Isles. On the right, actress Alison Steadman, who gives a radiant performance as a silly yet somehow saintly working-class wife in a new movie called Life Is Sweet. Which happens to have been written and directed by the •furry gentleman on the left, Mike Leigh. Who is Ms. Steadman's husband. And who also happens to be on a roll. Leigh's last film, High Hopes (1988), was a savagely funny indictment of Thatcherite England. And Life Is Sweet is just as good—a balmy, scorchingly intimate comedy about a loving family raising an unlovable daughter. Leigh's movies are an astonishing mixture of realism, grotesquerie, and bonkers humor that resemble nothing else in contemporary film, and during the last few years, they've gotten even more pungent and more original. England's secret is no longer safe.

STEPHEN SCHIFF