Another year (2010)

Bittersweet is perhaps the word that best describes the atmosphere of most of Mike Leigh’s movies. Temporal, is another. Like few other directors, Mike Leigh has a sensitive awareness about what time does with people. His characters carry the weight of the past, but the story is also moving toward the future. The resolutions of his films rarely give us a complete idea about what their future lives will look like. Leigh works with situations that have an appearance of hope, but darker undercurrents are always present somehow. Another year follows a bunch of characters in late middle age during a year. Tom and Gerri (oh yes, there are jokes about their names), happily married, invite their friend Mary for dinner. Mary drinks too much, and at the end of the evening, she embarrassingly blurts out the romantic failures of her lives. Gerri and Tom seem to have seen this happening before. They know their friend; they know what she is like. They are not condescending to her, but they exchange meaningful glances among themselves. This is a typical segment of the film. There is no straightforward narrative. Leigh is more interested in interaction between people. How bitterness is expressed among friends, what disappointment can look like, the impossibility to share another’s joy. At some points, I felt that the acting was a bit over the top. But this is no major complaint. Most of the time, Leigh captures a sense of quiet human disaster, but also, as a contrast, relationships that seem so loving that it is hard to imagine that anything could disturb them. Another year is about what we become, how our lives turn out, what we take ourselves to be. Tom and Gerri seem happy with their lives, their work, each other. Their friend Mary, on the other hand, keeps convincing them that she is having a blast. Of course she doesn’t. In every moment, we see how she is deluding herself, and that there is no easy way out of this delusion. She is lonely, but she is also desperately clinging to people. She simply doesn’t seem to know what sort of life she wants. The friendship between the spouses and Mary contains several tensions. Tom and Gerri are too well-behaved to turn down their unconsciously unhappy friend. On the other hand, they set limits to what kind of bullshit they are prepared to take. Mary’s perspective on Tom and Gerri seems equally conflictual. Another year is a somber movie, with intermittent moments of dark humor. I must confess I was quite moved by it. Mike Leigh is not fascinated with the gruesome or the evil – rather, what makes his film special is their attempt to depict goodness, devotion and reconciliation. By the way: middle-aged women are rarely allowed much space on the screen. This is a film with several compelling characters that are not twenty year old college girls.