Topsy-Turvy

In films like Life is Sweet, Naked and Secrets & Lies, British filmmaker Mike Leigh tells intimate and engrossing stories of ordinary, modern-day Londoners navigating extraordinary emotional territory. With Topsy-Turvy, Leigh leaps back to Victorian England to grant filmgoers an audience with two whose lives were marked by extraordinary creativity: famed comic opera writers Gilbert and Sullivan. While Sullivan is having a creative crisis, Gilbert is facing a failing marriage to Lucy. When they suffer their first failure, both men are depressed, and Sullivan announces that he's giving up operetta for good. However, a visit to a Japanese art exhibition sparks an idea in Gilbert, and soon he and Sullivan are hard at work on what will become one of their greatest successes, The Mikado. (1999, 160 minutes, Rated R for a scene of risqué nudity)