Word: leigh
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Roommates in college, they are getting together for a weekend in London after a six-year hiatus in their relationship. Since this takes place under the auspices of writer-director Mike Leigh, you know going in that you are volunteering for a movie in which cramped spaces will be crammed with intensely realistic acting. And that the past, which his characters are almost never able to put safely behind them, will keep nipping, biting, chomping at his Career Girls...
Like virtually all Leigh's characters, Annie and Hannah are trapped in the hopelessness of modern life. Or should we make that modern English life? Educated to the point of glibness, but not to the point of wisdom, they know just enough to recognize the constraints of class, gender and material longing, but not enough to break through them, to achieve the freedom of mind and spirit that modernity keeps promising but never quite delivers. This leaves them at once ranting and wistful, delivering those arias of discontent--often funny, sometimes touching, always brutally frank--that are the hallmark...
Though our heroines' initial wariness gives way to a tentative reawakening of a friendship less abrasive, possibly more trusting, than it once was, nothing much happens, dramatically speaking, in Career Girls. It is less scarring than Leigh's Naked, less poignant than Secrets & Lies. But still it offers a behavioral truthfulness and a passionate engagement with the despairs of dailiness that put most movies to shame...
...hallmark of the director?s famously improvisational style," says TIME's Richard Schickel. "Though our heroines' initial wariness gives way to a tentative reawakening of a friendship less abrasive, possibly more trusting, than it once was, nothing much happens, dramatically speaking, in 'Career Girls.' It is less scarring than Leigh's 'Naked,' less poignant than 'Secrets & Lies.' But still it offers a behavioral truthfulness and a passionate engagement with the despairs of dailiness that put most movies to shame...
...Leigh doesn't give us anything too new--we've seen her fast-talking, tough-gal shtick before--but here she backlights her act with a implicit desperation that gnaws away at one's core. Even her act feels tragic as such: like a dreamy teenager, she rattles off to Mrs. Stilton her favorite movie stars and their birth places, and we begin to think she herself is merely an amalgam of all the brands of scrappy newspaperwoman bravery she's seen on screen...