With Peterloo, he is, of course, into period mode and working-class politics, but ‘epic’ is the word that now springs to mind. By ‘epic’, I don’t merely refer to the imposing sweep he brings to the retelling of historical events. ‘Epic’ in film terms has often referred to expensive, big-scale affairs with more brawn than brain, but at its best it implies a conception of real magnitude that invokes the resources of cinema with precision and visual power. Peterloo belongs in this category. It even resonates with the Brechtian notion of epic theatre, which argues that emotional involvement with the action should not preclude a rational appraisal of the matters at hand. In Peterloo, Leigh insists that we think as well as feel.

Four years after the Battle of Waterloo, Manchester (and Lancashire in general) was in a poor economic state, with workers and families battling poverty and hunger. There was a groundswell of opposition against a government out of touch with their needs: the Corn Laws exacerbated their food shortages; they had no parliamentary representatives; the committee of magistrates seemed to think of the people at large as a ‘mob’. The film builds solidly towards the day – 16 August 1819 – of the St Peter’s Field demonstration against the kinds of tyranny to which the insurgents were subjected, and the ensuing massacre when the yeomanry was called in to disperse the crowd brutally.

A still from Peterloo

Leigh explores the movement toward this climactic moment via a soldier, Joe (David Moorst), traumatised after Waterloo, who has difficulty finding work in Manchester. Through his eyes we see evidence of decline (and in Moorst’s poignant performance, his eyes are crucial), but this perspective means that we are not simply being offered a slab of history. Joe, back with his straitened if not broken family (Maxine Peake and Pearce Quigley, as parents), forms a sense of what life has become in this community.

In the series of outpourings that are a key element in the build-up, Leigh’s screenplay imbues the speakers with substance as well as rhetoric; there are women’s rallies as well as men’s; and the failure of Parliament, let alone of the pudgy Prince Regent (Tim McInnerney), to take on board the reality of the Mancunian hardships or the incipient revolt. There is rage against the cruelty of class and wealth, but the film is careful not to allow either side of the conflict unequivocal support, though it is clear where its sympathies lie. The magistrates are obviously at odds with the people’s cause, but even as disadvantaged a woman as Nellie (Peake) claims that it is wrong to talk of imprisoning the king, and, when the uprising secures the services of radical real-life orator Henry Hunt (Rory Kinnear), he is not without an element of vanity. His white hat is part of the personal image he offers, and when the huge audience is gathered in the square, he makes it plain that he will not share the podium with another speaker.

The massacre – following crowd gatherings in pubs and halls and, finally, at St Peter’s Field – is horrifying. The magistrates, observing the crowd from an upper-story window, read the Riot Act and call in the yeomanry, the sharpening and polishing of whose sabres has been earlier glimpsed. What ensues is not just an instance of the mindless violence so often on display in big-budget blockbusters, but a brutal, class-based attack on a citizenry that has hoped to effect change without insurrection but by a mass voicing of cruel inequities. Leigh builds the growing tension in this gathering of tens of thousands as it listens to the orator, picking out individuals here and there, but always aware of the wide-ranging social and political issues at stake.

Director Mike Leigh (photograph by Stuart Crawford/Wikimedia Commons)The whole of this climactic episode is brilliantly filmed by Leigh’s long-time cinematographer, Dick Pope, as indeed is the entire film. He registers the contrasts between the scenes of economic hardship and upper-class affluence, between boisterous crowds and close-up images of, say, pie-making, between the subdued browns and greys of run-down workplaces or domestic interiors and the passive green of surrounding hillsides, or between the watchful throng at the final gathering and its silent, body-strewn aftermath. For much of the film, Pope’s palette reminds us of Brueghel and Vermeer.

At two-and-a-half hours, perhaps the film overstays its welcome, but it can be argued that it needs time to build the growing resentments as they turn to anger. It might also be said that it ends on an over-didactic note, with journalists creating the term ‘Peterloo’ to echo the victory of four years earlier. However, Leigh’s triumph is to invest both the personal and the historical with his famously uncompromising sense of truth and reality.

Peterloo (154 minutes) was premièred in Australia at the British Film Festival. It has a national release date of 28 March 2019.

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