Once, in my former life as a pen-pushing civil servant in North London, a typist at the office where I worked had, what with hindsight, must have been a nervous breakdown. She was a polite, quietly spoken and well turned out middle-aged woman who, one morning, was restrained in the high street in front of the office where she had been shouting and screaming at passers-by.
The exact circumstances were vague but someone told me afterwards that she was unhappy because she couldn’t have children. I hadn’t thought about her for years but I remembered her while watching Mike Leigh’s latest film ‘Another Year’.
This movie revolves around a stable and affectionate married couple Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) who are a study in domestic bliss. She is a medical counsellor at a hospital, he is a geologist. They spend their free time pottering in a local allotment and are contentedly approaching the third age of their lives together.
“We are lucky if we find someone” says actress Lesley Manville in an interview as part of the DVD extras. In the film, she plays the role of secretary Mary who gradually comes to define the movie’s main themes of loneliness and isolation. Mary is very needy and desperately alone; she looks at every man as a potential partner undeterred by the fact that her choices in the past have been failures.
Lesley Manville as Mary - a study in isolation.
She tries to put on a brave face about being single, saying she likes the freedom, but is not convincing anyone. She is, I suppose in her late 40s or early 50s, but still flirts with Tom and Gerri’s 30-year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman) who wisely opts to keep her at arm’s length.
Gerri tolerates her eccentricities until she starts to threaten the stability of their home life, the tipping point being when she snubs Joe’s girlfriend Kate (Karina Fernandez) at a dinner party.
As we go about our daily lives, our grief and insecurities have to be held in check in order to present an acceptable public face. There must be countless Eleanor Rigby-cases like Mary and the typist I remember. On the surface, they live respectable lives but underneath they feel wretched and worthless.
Mike Leigh must get heartily fed up of explaining his working methods. With the release of every film, there is always an interview in which he describes how characters are created by periods of in-role improvisations from which a final script emerges. The direction of the plot is dictated by this very British variant of method acting.
There is always an element of caricature in his films but what is more important is that they are always full of humanity and aim to present ordinary lives without being patronising.
By focussing on character rather than plot, his studies of simple folk draw out the hidden truths where the silences and body language often say more than the dialogue.
“Life is not always kind” observes Gerri, and Another Year ends with a poignant shot of Mary looking completely lost and hopeless.
