Another Year

During his twenty years as a film-maker British writer-director Mike Leigh has delivered a remarkable body of work in the realist tradition. His latest film's title beautifully captures his agenda. In what is a kind of updating of the Noel Coward/David Lean classic, This Happy Breed (1944), he portrays the everyday lives of his characters by giving us four vignettes, aligned to the classical structure of the four seasons of the year, starting in Spring and ending in Winter, a progression which is entirely appropriate to his point of view. The difference to the earlier film is that Another Year is no sentimental celebration of mundane English decency but rather a deft exposure of its, to paraphrase somewhat, comfortable numbness.

Although Leigh presents Tom and Gerri as the epitome of the happy married middle-class couple they are also for him exemplars of what the existentialists called “bad faith” –  good people who live lives of complacency, their self-image deriving from their conformity to middle class values (rather brilliantly Leigh makes Gerri a social worker, and her son, a legal aid lawyer professional whilst engineer Tom swans around examining soil samples for major construction projects. That Tom and Gerri drive a Volvo station wagon, speaks for itself.

As much as the couple are the fulcrum of the narrative and indeed the epicentre of the lives of the other characters, this does not mean that they are the film’s “heroes”. Leigh’s real sympathies, and this is characteristic of his work, is with the marginalized characters who are acutely aware of their own failure to achieve what Tom and Gerri have  - a home, an allotment, a family, a happy marriage. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, Gerri reprimands Mary (Lesley Manville, who, with Sheen, had been in Leigh's 2002 film, All Or Nothing), a pathetically desperate divorced work colleague who has set her cap at Gerri’s 30 year old son, that she (Mary) has transgressed the bounds of her (Gerri’s) family. It’s a scene which goes to the heart of Leigh’s critique of the deadening social and emotional dynamics of English society.  

Of course this kind of critical perspective tends to result in typological film-making (indeed Mary, particularly late in the film, looks almost like the character of “the fallen woman” from a silent movie, whilst the opening scene of Imelda Staunton is unalloyed realist glumness) and this may displease some audiences who will only see Leigh as banging the same drum of misery. Leigh himself  would hardly be oblivious to this criticism, but it does not detract from both his trenchant determination to show people's lives unpolished by Hollywood gloss and his skill in hitting his target with the kind of accuracy that only a seasoned trooper could possess. With a wonderfully well-crafted script realized by a fine ensemble of actors, Another Year is one of his finest films.

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