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