Career Girls
Quite his shortest feature, Mike Leigh’s Career Girls has none of the emotional density of his Oscar-nodded Secrets And Lies, the bleakness of, er, Bleak Moments, nor the desperate holding on of Life is Sweet. Hannah (Naked’s Katrin Cartlidge) invites former college roomie Annie (Lynda Steadman) to London for the weekend. They haven’t seen each other in six years. Their life together unfolds in a series of flashbacks, while in the here and now the two view new flats for Hannah and bump into old friends. One, the smug Adrian (Joe Tucker), is an estate agent who doesn’t even remember Annie, while the grubby and corpulent Ricky (Mark Benton) is mentally ill. ‘I’m not an idiot,’ he tells them. ‘I’m like an idiot savant. I just haven’t found my savant yet.’
From all that Goth-ing about to the awfulness of a student kitchen, through the grotesque yuppie looking to sell his Docklands flat (‘On a clear day I bet you can see the class struggle from here’), this is one of Leigh’s funnier films. Observation, as ever, is the key. As their old selves Cartlidge and Steadman sail close to the wind. An entire film with just these two would be suicidal, but they are nicely counterbalanced by their current, likeable incarnations’ hesitant circling of a joint past rooted in Annie’s tics and student squalor to a Cure soundtrack. Leigh treading water - but few tread water so entertainingly.