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. Continue reading
