Peterloo

Peterloo is the Best Mike Leigh picture I've seen. Yes it is too long & speech filled but the Manchester massacre of 1819 is horribly dramatic. You see how the forces of the status quo combine to send in the cavalry & yeomanry to charge at peaceful protestors, maiming hundreds and killing 15. The protestors wanted the right to vote, reform in Parliament (Manchester didn't have an MP) & lower food prices. The film is very well shot with an excellent performance as always from Maxime Peake. Oddly after a long build up to the massacre there is no focus on what happened afterwards.

"Rise like Lions after slumber in unvanquishable number- Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you- Ye are many-they are few." Shelley, from The Masque of Anarchy

No contemporary director depicts and loves the working class better than Mike Leigh: look at Secrets and Lies for the best example. Believing that not enough people know about the massacre in 1819 in Manchester, where the British army slaughtered 18 and wounded scores of commoners peacefully assembling for liberty and rights, Leigh filmed Peterloo, the popular name for the uprising.

With an ear for local locutions and pompous preening, Leigh alternates between the people and their monarchial rulers, showing the sincerity of the marchers and the fear of the magistrates, who wish for nothing more than a Waterloo to stem the French-revolution-like yearnings of the folk. When administrators order the soldiers to squash the gathering, it's the beginning of responsible press reporting the malignity of entrenched rulers.

Leigh's longtime cinematographer, Dick Pope, has exceptional shots of the laborers and their homes to rival the best work of Millet and Courbet. The framing arches and rolling fields provide Pope with contours and colors to complement the dignity and vitality of the people.

However, it's Leigh's unfailing ear for diction and eye for metaphor that distinguish him as a David Lean of the working class. Contrasting the magistrates clustered around drafting the warrants for the crowd and the almost lyrical happiness of the assembly not only sets up the worlds of sad and happy, but they also heighten the terror as the innocent are vanquished by the proud.

Out of this debacle came a strong press that began and never stopped evaluating the ruling class. All hail the emergence of the Manchester Guardian.

"Let a great Assembly be Of the fearless and the free On some spot of English ground Where the plains stretch wide around." Shelley

A slow work up to the massacre. Incredible massacre scene. Would have like more on the aftermath as the film ended abruptly. Overlong I thought.

Like most working-class Brits, I knew nothing of Peterloo (and I am from Manchester into the bargain).

Mike Leigh has done an excellent job, documenting this momentous event in British history, an event conveniently airbrushed out of my secondary school education. Imagine that.

A good 2.5 hrs long, it would make a decent 12 part Netflix drama. Though, he'd never get the funding for that.

It is long, it is educational, it is historical, it is incredibly worthy. Watch it and draw parallels with the Britain of today. FPTP electoral system, zero-hours contracts, food banks, Brexit, et al.

i gave it a 9.

This is the first review I've ever done, but was moved to do so by some reviews that I have read on here since watching the film. So apologies to you experts, but here's my tuppenceworth. On the down side, a bit overlong, could have been a bit less wordy and faster paced. But, I left the cinema with the same feeling that I did in the early 70s after seeing Soldier Blue: stunned by the brutality of "the authorities" over the disenfranchised. Forensic in its drama/documentry approach and absolutely true to events (I have since checked various historical sources). This is what happens when people feel they lack a voice and does resonate with today's UK. I thought the lighting was superb and the epic, grand scale setting rare in a UK film. A must watch for teenagers who will not have heard of this event in history at school.