The British director Mike Leigh does not arrive at the first rehearsal with a finished screenplay. His scripts are written in the room, with the actors, out of weeks of discussion and improvisation. That is why the jury of San Sebastián said more than it may have intended when it handed Tender Loving Care the festival’s top prize, the Golden Shell, and then gave the same film its award for best screenplay.

Most of the coverage has settled on a single reading: a master’s farewell. Leigh has said the film is more than likely his last, and he was not in the room to collect the prize. The frame is honest, and incomplete. Taken together with the lead-performance award for Kate O’Flynn, what the jury rewarded is less a career in retrospect than a way of working, caught at full strength just as its author says he must stop.

Leigh has been plain about the reason, and plainly unsentimental. Speaking by video link at the festival’s press conference, he said he has myositis, a condition “which affects my muscular movement, and it’s quite difficult to move around,” adding that it is “certainly more difficult than it should be for a filmmaker.” He declined any grander framing, as The Hollywood Reporter recorded: “It’s a practical matter to do with my medical condition — a physical condition.”

The practical matter weighs heavily because of how Leigh builds a film. In his own description, the world of the characters and their relationships “is brought into existence by discussion and a great amount of improvisation,” long before anything is fixed on the page. The International Cinephile Society’s critic, who gave Tender Loving Care five stars, describes the same process here: rigorous rehearsals during which the script is written. A screenplay prize for such a film is, in effect, a prize for a room full of actors and one patient director. It sits naturally beside O’Flynn’s Silver Shell, which she shares with Asta Kamma August of Growth of the Soil: both awards come out of the same rehearsal.

The film stays on the ground Leigh has worked for decades. O’Flynn plays Amy, a London social worker who looks after foster children. According to the Catalan daily Ara, a breakup sends her to live with her best friend Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), a fellow social worker whose clients are elderly, while she works up the courage to tell her affectionate parents, Birdie and Geoff, played by Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson. Bailey, Leigh’s partner, has appeared in several of his films. The Hollywood Reporter says a family health crisis becomes central, and that the film takes in Britain’s post-war decline and the cuts to health and social care.

Read against the oeuvre, the Golden Shell closes a line of honours that runs from the Cannes directing prize for Naked through the Palme d’Or for Secrets & Lies to the Golden Lion for Vera Drake. Ara’s critic points out that Leigh had not won the top prize at a major festival since Venice, and argues that the award should not be read only as a tribute to a great director leaving cinema. The reviews largely agree on the register: Ara calls the film one of his best, a portrait of imperfect people without condescension, where tenderness wins over harshness; the ICS review calls it “the perfect summation of everything that makes Leigh such a vitally important artistic voice.”

Leigh’s own gloss explains the jury better than any tribute could. “We do not stop being human because we live in darker times,” he said, as quoted by Ara. “It is a story about compassion. And compassion is still important.” A filmmaker whose body now limits how he can work has made, very probably as his last word, a film about people whose job is looking after others.

He did not collect the prizes in person. According to Deadline, Leigh was in New York and sent a video message: “What a great honour it is. Thank you for awarding Tender Loving Care… thank you, thank you, and love to everybody.” O’Flynn had also been unable to travel to the festival, which producer Georgina Lowe attended. The film, which also screened at Telluride and Toronto, is being distributed by Bleecker Street; Leigh had last come to San Sebastián with Hard Truths.

The jury, presided over by the American filmmaker Ira Sachs, spread the rest of the Official Selection prizes of the 74th edition, held from September 18 to 26. Amanda Kernell won the Silver Shell for best director for Brace Your Heart, Javier Cámara took best supporting performance for 5 More Minutes, Oskar Dahlsbakken won the cinematography prize for Growth of the Soil, and Ah Biao’s Border received the Special Jury Prize. Audiences had their own favourites: La bola negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s film around Federico García Lorca, won the City of Donostia Audience Award a week after taking the People’s Choice Award in Toronto, and NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the audience award for best European film. It was the last edition under festival director José Luis Rebordinos; Maialen Beloki, the first woman to hold the post, takes over next year.

The screenplay San Sebastián honoured was written by the one process Leigh now says his body will more than likely not let him run again. That is what the jury put its name to: not the end of a career, but the last proof of how it was made.

Tags: film festivals, Mike Leigh, San Sebastian Film Festival, Kate O'Flynn, Tender Loving Care

British director Mike Leigh’s ‘Tender Loving Care’ wins San Sebastián’s Golden Shell, and a screenplay prize for a script born in rehearsal

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