Life Is Sweet (1991) on Netflix
North of London, twins Natalie and Nicola live with their parents, Wendy and Andy. Natalie works as a plumber; Nicola is jobless, bulimic and unhappy. Andy buys a dilapidated food van.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb7.4/1012,281 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
North of London, Wendy clerks in a shop and teaches aerobics at a primary school, and her husband Andy cooks in a large catering kitchen. Their twenty-something twin daughters still live at home and hold profoundly different attitudes. Natalie, a plumber with neat short hair, works, drinks pints and dreams of a trip to America. Nicola, jobless, keeps to her room, smokes, argues and binges on food before forcing herself to vomit, a habit Natalie overhears through the bedroom wall. Andy impulsively buys a dilapidated fast-food van from a disreputable acquaintance and plans to restore it for a local round, though Wendy is skeptical of the scheme. Aubrey, a family friend, shows the couple the Parisian-themed restaurant, The Regret Rien, that he is preparing to open.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Life Is Sweet (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- David Thewlis was disappointed at being given the small part of Nicola's anonymous lover, so Mike Leigh promised that the next time he cast him in a film he'd be given a fair slice of the pie. Thewlis's next Leigh role was the lead, Johnny, in Naked, a performance that won him awards.
- Aubrey's bizarre recipes were devised by Mike Leigh and Timothy Spall over the course of an evening and then checked with a professional chef, who advised which ones were technically impossible to prepare; every dish that appears in the film is, as Leigh put it, feasible, gross as it sounds.
- Stephen Rea, who played Patsy, was uncomfortable that his character supported Tottenham Hotspur, because Rea is an Arsenal supporter and the two clubs are long-term rivals, according to Leigh.
- Life Is Sweet was the first release from Thin Man Films, the production company created by Mike Leigh and producer Simon Channing Williams, and Thin Man has produced all of Leigh's films since.
- Alison Chitty found the Enfield house used for the family home and fell in love with it because of its garden shed; she also found and painted the old mobile snack-bar that Rea's Patsy sells on to Broadbent's Andy, in Northampton.
