Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky
From May 27th through June 8th, 2022, Film at Lincoln Center presented Human Conditions: The Films of Mike Leigh, a very rewarding retrospective of the brilliant English director. Unfortunately, most of the works were not screened in their correct formats—most of his films that were photographed in 35-millimeter were screened in digital—but it was a wonderful opportunity to see or re-see those that were. I’ve here appended some commentary on the titles I viewed.
Although Leigh’s work forms a unity, the beautiful High Hopes from 1988—his first theatrical feature since his extraordinary debut, Bleak Moments, from 1971—seems like a breakthrough into what subsequently became Leigh’s characteristic mode, although it is not a simple matter to explain in virtue of what the distinction lies—one intuition is that the later works employ a certain schematism in scenario construction whereas the scenes in the earlier films are closer in character to sketches paratactically organized rather than architecturally plotted. Meantime, a terrific film from 1983, in this way appears closer to productions like Bleak Moments and the charming Nuts in May from 1977 than to the works inaugurated by High Hopes—which proved also to be Leigh’s breakout film internationally—although Meantime’s focus on the bleakness of English working-class life and family conflict were to continue to be central preoccupations. Film at Lincoln Center’s program note is as follows:
An episodic comic drama originally produced for Britain’s Channel 4, Meantime centers on the Pollocks, an East End–dwelling working-class family trying to keep the lights on amid the recession during Thatcher’s premiership. Mavis (Pam Ferris) works while her ornery husband Frank (Jeff Robert) and their sons Colin (Tim Roth) and Mark (Phil Daniels) collect unemployment; meanwhile, Mavis’s sister Barbara (Marion Bailey) and her husband (Alfred Molina) enjoy the comforts of life in the comparatively posh suburb of Chigwell. We follow the characters across a host of familiar settings—pubs, flats, the unemployment office—as they just try to get by, with Leigh deftly interweaving these scenes to produce a dimensional and sobering portrait of the indignities of life on the dole.
Although critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman have astutely remarked upon a Manichaenism of “good souls and villains” (see below) in Leigh’s work, it is interesting that another noted feature of the director’s oeuvre is its ambiguity, which is one o fMeantime’s great strengths—here as often elsewhere, this film invites the viewer to interpret which of the characters’ possible, and possibly contradictory, motives may be at play as well as how benign or malign they are. As usual with Leigh, Meantime is populated by multiple extraordinary performances—I single out for special mention those of Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, when they were unknowns, and the now undervalued Phil Daniels. Also worth citing is the quality of the digital transfer in what is described as a 2K “restoration.”
The latter is also true of the accompanying short film, the wonderful, comic—if not without its “bleak moments”—The Short and Curlies, which is especially memorable for an early appearance of a hilarious David Thewlis, and is one more step towards the artistic maturity of High Hopes.The program note for it reads: “A woman (Sylvestra Le Touzel) navigates a romance with a man (David Thewlis) who never ceases cracking jokes, while also reporting back on it to her adoring hairdresser mother.”
Film at Lincoln Center’s program note on the impressively photographed Another Year from 2002 reads as follows: