Eee by eck as like. What a bleedin shambles. For hours you sit through interminable mock-northern twangyness trying to fathom where this rambling dross is going. You know it has to have some scenes from 'Peterloo' - the massacre that occurred on 16th August 1819 when several tens of thousands of people went to St Peter's Field Manchester to hear Orator Hunt speak on the urgent need for parliamentary reform. In this film, you won't learn why this outdoor meeting was turned into a bloodbath even if you do pick up some names to bandy about. Look folks, following the French Wars, ending with Waterloo in 1815, England's working class found themselves between a rock and a hard place. They were experiencing unprecedented deprivations caused by failed harvests, taxation, the loss of work (the introduction of factories and mechanization amongst other insults. They had no representation in parliament where decisions affecting their lives were made. What could they do? In other places there had been riots (East Anglia and Spa Fields 1816) machine breaking (Nottingham and Leicester), marches on London and the Pentrich rising, there had been blasphemy and sedition in the gutter press stirring muck and murk. Peterloo was extraordinary in that the populace had gone specifically without anything resembling a weapon...no walking sticks, no missiles etc. They had nothing with which to defend themselves. It was organised as a family friendly event to which even a band of 150 women paraded their supportive banners. So, what Mike Leigh presents us is a mish-mash of individual incidents that fail to convey the true depth and seriousness of the situation. Trite dialogue includes stupidities such as when, looking at her sleeping child, Maxine Peake's character says "In 1900 she'll be 85". FFS, it is supposed to be 1819, the people think their futures are lost. They're only just in the first fifth of their own new century. What a stupid thing to have a character say. After sitting through more stupidities of this nature, we finally get to see a re-enactment of the massacre. By this time we've learnt how to identify the people who are going to get cut down. The whole shambles is a travesty of what really happened. In reality, the yeomen knew by name the people they harangued. What you don't see is the merchants and factory owners who took it upon themselves to cause the devastation and provoke the yeomen into committing atrocities over and above the hundreds of wounds and injuries suffered by those trapped in the calamitous rout . Suddenly the film ends...what? It is what happened after the massacre that really is of significance but, we don't find anything out about that, the Six Acts or the galvanizing of class warfare. This film is tripe. Give it a miss.
Review of Peterloo
