The luckiest period films are sometimes remembered for how we feel like can reach out and touch them – its fabrics, its realized era details, the life given to figures we’ve known solely through the distance of history books. However, Mike Leigh’s Peterloo is one to by known by its odor, and in the best possible way. Here the typically idiosyncratically observed director gives us a massive textbook with the dust clouding off of it as he slams it in our laps, reeking of the kind of appealingly pungent book mold that immediately promises something austere and of a bygone time. But most importantly, it also instantly appears substantial.
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