D: Mike Leigh; with Katrin Cartlidge, Lynda Steadman, Kate Byars, Mark Benton,
Andy Serkis, Joe Tucker. (R, 90 min.)
Time makes different people of us all. One day, our faces are fresh and unlined;
the next, they bear the folds and creases added to them by Time. Time alters our
dress, our manners, our tastes, often so dramatically that we are unrecognizable
next to our younger selves. In this new film by writer-director Mike Leigh (Secrets
and Lies), Time's alchemy is brought to bear on two old friends who reunite for a
weekend in London. Six years have passed since the two, Annie and Hannah, last saw
each other, but that time might have been an eon given the changes it's worked in
the pair. Gone is Hannah's stringy, unkempt hair from their days at University, her
racing, slashing speech, her seething rage. Gone is the bleached New Wave 'do Annie
wore when they shared a dingy walkup over a Chinese takeout stand in the Eighties;
gone are her anxious, darting eyes, her wrenching insecurity. In their place are
the cultivated looks and poise of two successful working women of the Nineties. The
film is their journey of discovery, the search for what is left of the young women
who were friends six long years ago, for what, if anything, is left of their friendship.
As he's done to great effect in previous films, Leigh takes a fragment of common
experience and focuses his lens on it, shooting it in extreme close-up so that it
may be seen for all its layers and textures and subtleties in the play of light and
shadow. Here, friendship is shown as a complex bonding of personalities, a union
cemented as much by the friends' differences as similarities, by betrayals as well
as fidelity. We come to see this because Leigh allows us the time to study these
women. His camera lingers over their faces, waiting for the full play of emotion
to wash over them. And an abundance of feeling plays across the faces of his two
leads; Cartlidge and Steadman bring to light every flicker of awkwardness, indecision,
anger, regret, joy, admiration, and affection felt by Hannah and Annie. Cartlidge
is a marvel as the quicksilver Hannah, her fury and wit unleashed with the vicious
speed and bite of a whip. Steadman is more subdued, but when she shows us the elder
Annie recalling the past, her countenance is a thing of wonder ­ a pool of
serenity, over which pass ripples of compassion and tenderness. These actors ground
the film and keep us in its corner, even when Hannah and Annie rather conveniently
keep running into key figures from their past. It feels as though Leigh is forcing
his hand with these coincidental meetings, and yet, obvious as they are, they reinforce
the bonds between the two and how they've grown because of their friendship. In this,
Career Girls offers a rare form of comfort, an assurance that we matter in the lives
of others and that the difference we make can endure even the great changes wrought
by Time.
4.0 stars
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