Career Girls

Yes, this film has been panned by many, but in my view Mike Leigh was near top form again with this absorbing and moving film. The late, great Katrin Cartlidge puts in an excellent performance. Dreadfully sorry to learn that such a talented young stage and screen actress has died. Lynda Steadman is also superb.

The film is partly in flashback to college days in the 1980s and partly set in the "present" of the 1990s. I see the exaggerated twitching and accents of the characters in the 1980s scenes as part of the flashback genre. Perhaps I went to University with exceptionally twitchy people, or perhaps the memory pitches college-days memories at 30 frames-per-second, but my own "flashbacks" to such times feel a bit like that. I thought it was intriguing cinematography, but the majority seems to be against me.

Where the film does grate a little is in the coincidences that lead them to run in to their past several times. Two of the coincidences are necessary for the plot and interest. One seems like "a coincidence too many" and it goes nowhere - maybe there was an intended plot thread that got dropped - well the coincidence should also have been dropped in that case.

It's a short film and it held our attention from start to finish. Not Mike Leigh's very best film, but well worth seeing.

Mike Leigh's often improvised, raw films can be off-putting if you're unprepared. He has a real nack for finding performers who put their full souls into his films and the style of the acting in this film explodes with a vibrant, distinctive energy. A slice-of-life tale of two college friends who meet up years later and find coincidence and fate entwine in quite unpredictable ways, the film is all about the tensions beneath the surfaces and those things that so often go unsaid. Its a love story between friends much like "Muriels Wedding" and again without a sexual component. The two women undertake an exterior and interior journey and learn about the love that friendship quietly evolves. Cartlidge and Steadman are unique performers and the beautiful music score is by "Secrets and Lies" actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

I've seen a lot of Mike Leigh's films and while I know that Career Girls isn't considered by most critics his best film, I think it's his most touching (at least from the ones I have seen). Annie and Hannah were roomates in college for 4 years, after they graduated Annie returned to her hometown and now 6 years later she's visiting her old friend in London for the first time in those 6 years. Re-uniting with old friends is something that has happened to all of us and always brings back the most bittersweet memories. This is a beautiful film and I recommend it to everyone.

When I saw Mike Leigh's Naked, the first time, one word, genius, never left my mind. I still think it is one of the most intelligent pieces of filmmaking I have ever seen.

About 180 degrees away in its subject matter, Career Girls affects me even more strongly. The idea that a couple of college girl-chums might get together after a few odd years, is nothing new. The film effectively puts their relationship under a microscope, in two drastically different times of maturation, the college years, and the 10 or so years after. Under that scrutiny each will blossom, brilliantly, through the short span of the film, much like a rose blooms in time-lapse photography. It's a helluva notion. Leigh accomplishes it all brilliantly.

We have all seen buddy pictures, and Career Girls is no 48 Hours, or Lethal Weapon. It's a truly sensitive look into the human soul, the human heart portraying a friendship we only imagine.

This film literally leaves me breathless.

As a life-long Mike Leigh fan, I first saw CAREER GIRLS on its cinema release a couple of years ago. No, it didn't make quite the same impact as (for example) NAKED or SECRETS AND LIES, but nonetheless it does boast impressive and detailed performances from its lead actors. Katrin Cartlidge's work was always intense and magnetic (I was lucky enough to see her on stage in Theatre de Complicite's MNEMONIC in 1998) - and her recent, tragic death from septicaemia in September 2002, aged 41, was a desperately sad loss to top-notch acting and independent film making.