Life Is Sweet movie storyline. Just north of London live Wendy, Andy, and their twenty-something twins, Natalie and Nicola. Wendy clerks in a shop, leads aerobics at a primary school, jokes like a vaudevillian, agrees to waitress at a friend’s new restaurant and dotes on Andy, a cook who forever puts off home remodeling projects, and with a drunken friend, buys a broken down lunch wagon.
Natalie, with short neat hair and a snappy, droll manner, is a plumber; she has a holiday planned in America, but little else. Last is Nicola, odd man out: a snarl, big glasses, cigarette, mussed hair, jittery fingers, bulimic, jobless, and unhappy. How they interact and play out family conflict and love is the film’s subject.
Life Is Sweet is a 1990 British comedy-drama film directed by Mike Leigh, starring Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks and Timothy Spall. Leigh’s third cinematic film, it was his most commercially successful title at the time of its release. The, by turns, tragi-comic story follows the fortunes of a working-class North London family over a few weeks one summer.
Aubrey’s restaurant The Regret Rien is named after the 1956 song “Non, je ne regrette rien” by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire, made famous by French singer Edith Piaf.
Andy often speaks in comic voices, at one point uttering the out-of-context line “He’s fallen in the water!”. This was the catchphrase of Little Jim, a recurring character from the 1950s BBC radio comedy programme The Goon Show.
Patsy is a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur football club. According to Leigh this was a source of some discomfort to Stephen Rea who played the character, since Rea is a supporter of the team’s long-term rivals Arsenal.
Life Is Sweet (1991)
Directed by: Mike Leigh
Starring: Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks, Stephen Rea, Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Moya Brady, David Neilson, Harriet Thorpe
Screenplay by: Mike Leigh
Production Design by: Alison Chitty
Cinematography by: Dick Pope
Film Editing by: Jon Gregory
Costume Design by: Lindy Hemming
Art Direction by: Sophie Becher
Music by: Rachel Portman
MPAA Rating: R for language and a scene of sensuality.
Distributed by: October Films
Release Date: December 14, 1991
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