Film review

  • Career Girls

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Leigh (1997)

    Annie (Lynda Steadman) comes to London to spend a weekend with Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge).  It’s 1996, their first meeting in six years and ten years since they first met.  Mike Leigh’s two-part narrative moves to and fro between the present and the pair’s experiences together when they were students at the Polytechnic of North London, exploring what has and hasn’t changed in the meantime.  (A change that, understandably, goes unmentioned:  their alma mater became the University of North London in 1992.)  Career Girls is quite a simple piece, which enjoyed less attention and praise than most other Mike Leigh films.  Yet it’s one of his most likeable.

    The early 1996 scenes suggest sharply divergent fortunes for the two young women since graduation.  Annie still lives with her mother in the northern town where she grew up; she has a dreary office job and hasn’t a boyfriend.  This seems to be the first time she’s plucked up courage to return to London, despite repeated invitations from Hannah, who meets her from the train at Kings Cross and drives Annie back to her rented flat.  Annie is awed by the evidence of her friend’s independence and sophistication.  Hannah, who’s from London, is materially better off; her greater degree of nerve makes for a big difference between her and Annie – and always did.  Even so, her present situation, in and outside work, is gradually revealed as unsatisfying (this isn’t done crudely – Hannah doesn’t make claims about her life which are then exposed as a sham).  Although things aren’t going brilliantly for either of them, the weekend also shows – to Hannah and Annie as well as to the viewer – how much they still get from each other’s company.  Thanks to the past they share, they trust each other like no one else.

    During the weekend, they revisit old haunts and bump into people they knew in their student days – Leigh virtually acknowledges this as artifice by having Annie and Hannah remark on what incredible coincidences these are.  In the case of Claire (Kate Byers) – already sharing a flat with Hannah when Annie arrived there, and who moved out at the end of the trio’s’ first year at North London Poly – it’s a very brief re-encounter:  Hannah and Annie catch sight of Claire out jogging.   Two men with whom they cross paths again illustrate, more starkly than the women do, metamorphosis vs stasis over the course of the intervening years.

    Annie accompanies Hannah on the latter’s regular weekend pastime of looking at flats she can’t afford to buy.  At their first port of call, the owner (Andy Serkis), after showing off his pornography, tries and fails to hit on Hannah.  (It’s a daft little role, in which then-unknown Serkis has screen presence to burn.)  At the next property, they’re met by an estate agent, Adrian Spinks (Joe Tucker), whom Annie instantly recognises.  He’s a former fellow student who spent plenty of time at the girls’ flat, where he slept with Hannah and listened to Annie’s sexual fantasies.  The louche lad of these flashbacks is now dapper (though seedy), and a husband and father.  Adrian has no memory at all of Annie; Hannah rings only the faintest bell.

    Richard ‘Ricky’ Burton (Mark Benton) – obese, socially inept and (as he’d now be described) on the spectrum – became Hannah and Annie’s flatmate for a while; after drunkenly confessing to Annie his (unrequited) love, he returned to his native Hartlepool and never came back to London.  Until, that is, the Saturday of the protagonists’ reunion weekend – or so Ricky says when, shortly before heading to Kings Cross for Annie to catch her train, they find him sitting on the steps outside where their flat used to be.  He’s almost deliriously angry; Annie and Hannah regretfully leave him where they found him.  A subsequent flashback to the earlier years describes how, after he left, the girls tracked Ricky down to Hartlepool.  He was incoherently furious and abusive there, too.

    When she first meets Hannah and Claire, mousy Annie isn’t just nervy but cripplingly self-conscious about her facial dermatitis – she can’t look people in the face for fear of exposing her own.  Hannah, in comparison, is no-nonsense and fast-talking but what she says and the voice she says it in, are highly eccentric; in her own way, she’s as twitchy as Annie.  By 1996, these idiosyncrasies are toned down (and Annie’s skin is much improved) but they certainly haven’t disappeared.  Ricky is a compendium of vocal and gestural agitations.  The BFI programme note for this screening of Career Girls comprised a 1996 interview with Mike Leigh.  The interviewer, Prairie Miller, notes in the film ‘a lot of signs of physical distress, like rashes and tics, that literally “flesh out” your characters’.  Leigh replies:

    ‘… we’re all susceptible to tics and twitches … The only reason why you may be prone to interpret or decode them as a series of statements, images or symbols of some kind is that on the whole characters in movies don’t behave like real people … [but] like actors behave when they’re playing characters in movies.  Which is to say, with all the twitches, tics and behavioural and physical characteristics removed … Here I am simply putting people on the screen the way we really are …’

    Leigh’s suggestion that the reality of physical imperfection ensures the larger reality of characters is obviously silly:  actors can be at their most actorish playing twitchers, stutterers and so on.  The playing of Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman in Career Girls at first seems artificial and overdone, and never stops being mannered.  The performances work, though – because the performers are in sync and find truth in their characters beyond the mannerisms.

    The film’s title is and isn’t ironic.  Hannah and Annie are career girls only in the sense that they have to, and will carry on having to, work for a living.  They find themselves in jobs that make next to no use of the higher education they’ve completed:  it’s something of a relief when a battered copy of Wuthering Heights from student days proves its lasting emotional importance to them.  Career Girls can now be seen (and I’d not seen it before) as the period piece it wasn’t conceived as.  Dick Pope’s supple camerawork and Eve Stewart’s production design capture various aspects of mid-1990s London.  At this distance in time, there’s also a nostalgic element to the time and place – knowing the New Labour new dawn was just around the corner, seeing the capital long before it turned into the capital of Brexit Island.  Watching the very talented Katrin Cartlidge, who died, aged forty-one, in 2002, adds to the feelings of melancholy.

    12 November 2021

  • Mothering Sunday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Eva Husson (2021)

    In Oxfordshire, on Mothering Sunday in 1924, Mr and Mrs Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman) are lunching out with similarly upper-class friends.  According to convention at the time, servants are given the afternoon off to visit their own mothers but Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), one of the Nivens’ two maids, is an orphan.  She goes instead to the nearby home of the Sheringhams (Craig Crosbie and Emily Woof), who are joining the Nivens, the Hobdays (Simon Shepherd and Caroline Harker) and their daughter Emma (Emma D’Arcy) for lunch.  Mr and Mrs Sheringham have already left the house, ahead of their son Paul (Josh O’Connor).  He is engaged to Emma Hobday, a socially suitable match for whom he feels little.  Paul and Jane have been secret lovers for years.  They go to bed together before he sets off for the lunch party at which he never arrives.  He’s killed in a car crash en route.

    These are the pivotal events of Eva Husson’s film, adapted from Graham Swift’s 2016 novel(la) of the same name (which I haven’t read), but Mothering Sunday, with a screenplay by Alice Birch, also moves forward in time from the titular day.  Jane leaves service, gets a job in an Oxford bookshop and, when the shop’s owner (Albert Welling) gives her a secondhand typewriter, embarks on a highly successful writing career.  She sets up house with Donald (Sope Dirisu), an academic philosopher.  He also dies, though of natural causes.  Many decades later, the elderly Jane (Glenda Jackson) wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Her reaction to the news, received from journalists on her doorstep, brings to mind Doris Lessing’s immediate response to learning of her Nobel in 2007.  Having sent the newshounds on their way, Jane returns indoors to remember, in private, Paul and the secrets he confided on what proved to be their last meeting.

    At the start, Mr Niven’s upbeat breakfast small talk about the fine weather promised for the day ahead doesn’t conceal his sad eyes and evidently infuriates his wife.  It’s soon made clear that Mothering Sunday is a wrenching occasion for the Nivens, both of whose sons were killed in the Great War – so were two of the Sheringhams’ three sons, with Paul the only survivor.  The bereavement of parents of a particular generation looks set to be a central theme of the film.  Mrs Niven’s sudden, brief loss of self-control during the lunch outing underlines too heavily the putting-on-a-brave-face charade she feels her life has become.  Her remarks that night to Jane, helping her mistress prepare for bed, come as a more compelling shock:  she envies Jane’s losing her parents when too young to grieve.  Unaware of the affair with Paul, Mrs Niven urges her maid to take advantage of her luck in having no one close enough to mourn.  In the event, however, this distinctive element of Mothering Sunday is muffled by the premature deaths in peacetime of Paul and Donald.  These prompt Jane’s sententious reflection that ‘Maybe all the men in my life have to die in order for me to write my great book’.

    The plot as outlined above is more eventful than the film feels as you watch it.  The prevailing languor of the 1924 scenes evokes the atmosphere of Edwardian summer screen stories, seemingly oblivious to the psychic chasm between the pre-1914 and post-1918 eras.  The English countryside visuals are often lovely and nearly as often predictable – Eva Husson cuts from a washing line, where a sheet billows in the breeze, to a pall of smoke rising from the wreck of Paul’s car as from a funeral pyre.  There’s some high-quality acting, most notably from Josh O’Connor, who leaves you interestedly uncertain as to just what melancholy Paul is regretting – his lost brothers, the prescribed married life that seems to await him, the extent to which he has exploited Jane, a combination of all three?  As Donald, Sope Dirisu is the latest example of a problem of colour-blind casting.  Black philosophy dons at Oxford in the 1930s were hardly ten a penny.  You can’t not notice Dirisu’s ethnicity or therefore not wonder what it means to the highly self-aware, vaguely feminist Jane.  It’s practically a given of British cinema and television that a sequence involving a press pack will be noisily overdone.  Any hopes that Eva Husson, who is French, might do better are dashed in Jane’s crudely staged confrontation with the Nobel Prize messengers.  But the director’s nationality and gender do make a difference in other ways.

    This is Husson’s third feature but her first with a mostly Anglophone cast.  The class differences that are crucial to the story don’t register as clearly as they should:  Jane sounds quite posh for a maid raised in an orphanage.  When Paul tells her that her mother ‘might have been a queen’, he’s surely meant to be seeing and hearing through the externals.  What he says means little since Odessa Young’s Jane neither looks nor sounds socially inferior – she’s a cut above the Nivens’ other maid, Milly (well played by Patsy Ferran).  There’s a literary tradition whereby the inherent ‘quality’ of a hero who’s from good stock but consigned by misfortune to a lowly start in life, will always shine through.  The cut-glass vowels of the title character in David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) make sense because John Howard Davies’ screen presence confirms Dickens’s confounding ability to blend polemical social drama and fairytale.  The idea feels antiquated now, though.  A British director of Mothering Sunday would, at least should, have known better than to let it survive as Husson does.  The film’s Jane, as she grows in self-belief and understanding, doesn’t change as much as she should.

    The ‘intimacy co-ordinator’, assuming there was one, certainly earned their fee.  Both leads appear naked in the bedroom sequences; Odessa Young stays that way for other scenes, too.  In Graham Swift’s narrative, after Jane and Paul have had sex, he leaves to meet his parents, his fiancée et al; Jane, alone in the Sheringhams’ house, wanders round it on a how-the-other-half-lives inspection, still undressed.  Eva Husson replicates this except that, of course, she leaves nothing to the imagination.  Young spends so much screen time unclothed that it’s difficult not to be conscious of the persisting nakedness of the actress, rather than of the character she’s playing.  No problem with this, supposedly, because Odessa Young is under a female gaze but how protective is that once a film’s in the public domain, with men and women gazing together?  It’s true that Mothering Sunday‘s listlessness is liable to leave as many of the audience snoring as phwoaring but that’s hardly the point.

    12 November 2021

     

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