Movie: Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1990)
Shortly after seeing this film, I discovered the debut album of Sophie Straat, an artist satirising the gentrification of Amsterdam through the 'Levenslied', the music genre most well known thanks to Andre Hazes, who sang songs about love and life in Amsterdam. 'Levenslied' is considered an authentic Amsterdam genre, especially because of its sincerity and its great attention to detail. Levenslied songs paint vivid pictures of even the most unknown corner of the city. Straat brings the same attention to detail and her music equally lends itself for drunk singalongs in Amsterdam bars. But her lyrics are jokey, and make use of irony and sarcasm to criticize the 'yuppy' transformation of the city.
Sophie Straat (translating to Sophie Street) is the stage name of Sophie Schwartz, a British-American woman who appears to not be born in Amsterdam, but who has only grown up there. In her songs she often sings with an obviously exaggerated Amsterdam accent to make her appear more authentic. This turns her songs into more than just sincere and (righteous) criticisms of the widening inequalities in Amsterdam, and the way the city obfuscates these by marketing itself as a global center of (green) progressiveness. They are also parodies (she teases, because she loves) of the Levenslied, and all the connotations and memories associated with it. These connotations and memories are sometimes infused with a conservative and reactionary nostalgia to an idealised version of an old 'authentic' Amsterdam and criticisms about the gentrification, globalisation and transformation of Amsterdam are just as often rooted in this conservative nostalgia as they are in genuine progressive causes. This contradiction is quite wonderfully expressed in Straat's songs.
Most of these ideas also feature in Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet, which took me by surprise a bit. I had expected it to be somewhat similar to Another Year, a gentle look at the lives of a British working class family. Instead, it's a detailed look at the misery of its characters and their inability to alter their lives, containing several scenes of visceral, sustained ugliness. At the same time it's an often very funny film which understands that you don't need to sanitise working class people to sympathise with them. It's really very good and further proof that Mike Leigh is one of the greatest contemporary British filmmakers. But the aesthetic experimentation of Straat and the way she mixes and plays around with different genres, styles and modes, highlighted why I may never fully fall for artists like Leigh. I like the artificiality and the 'constructed' subjectivity of art. I miss that in Leigh's films, though it is more visible here than in Another Year and Mr. Turner. Timothy Spall's character for example is a wonderful creation, and his introductory scene in particular is a great example of how stylistic exaggerations of reality can provide more truthful insights than sober depictions aiming for authenticity and verisimilitude.
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