IN BETWEEN DAYS - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2007.

In Between Days sets itself up with a difficult premise. How do you capture a time of life where your main character is neither here nor there, no longer an innocent but also not yet fully initiated into adulthood? You can go for a standard plot, following well-worn narrative lines, and it may work; you can use the established tropes to get your point across. It's more difficult, however, to break from convention and create something that gingerly touches on the desired emotions and becomes more about the mood itself than any easily outlined story narrative.

The debut feature-length film of experimental artist So Yong Kim, In Between Days does exactly that. It recreates the life of a young immigrant as she transitions from her old life in South Korea to a new life in North America, changing culturally as she also changes inside herself. Newcomer Jiseon Kim plays Aimie, the adolescent girl in question. She and her mother have moved across the ocean and are struggling to get by. Aimee's father is absent, possibly still in Korea, possibly having left for parts unknown. Aimee communicates with him throughout the film, in voiceover that could be a letter to him or could just be a monologue masquerading as a dialogue in her head. She longs to see him again, longs for some kind of reminder of when her life had a certain kind of stability.

Aimee is attending school to learn English and become further assimilated into her new environment, but she soon quits her lessons to get her tuition back and buy her companion Tran (Taegu Andy Kang) an expensive bracelet. She and Tran are friends, largely platonic, but with an affection between them that neither feels comfortable sharing. He broaches the subject in a joking manner, usually as an appeal for sex. They speak Korean most of the time, though both of them are fairly adept at English. Their lives are pretty much isolated in the Korean sector of their city, and they pass the time aimlessly, playing videogames, drinking coffee, smoking, and occasionally boosting car stereos for a little cash. They don't talk about much, their friendship is built on how easy it is to be together.

The two flirt with other people, but whether they are really interested in those people or they are just trying to make the other one jealous is not really clear. Nothing is really clear, because they don't know how to express themselves. Most of our understanding of Aimie comes from the things she says to her absent father. She's rude to her mother, and kind of a brat, really. Yet, Jiseon Kim's big, soulful eyes and soft face are so tender, our hearts break seeing the pain behind the petulance. Eventually she will have to face the facts about her father and her feelings for Tran, but she's going to put it off as long as she can.

So Yong Kim (Treeless Mountain [review]) co-wrote, edited, and directed In Between Days (co-writer Bradley Rust Gray went on to direct The Exploding Girl [review]). The movie was shot on digital video by cinematographer Sarah Levy, who also shot James Bolton's excellent indie drama The Graffiti Artist. This came as little surprise to me when I looked up Levy's name, as I was reminded of The Graffiti Artist while watching In Between Days. Both films have an unforced intimacy that is a combination of the minimalist acting, a director confident in having long periods of silence, and Levy's choice to move the camera in tight on the actors, nestling them in the image frame. Both films also play out on an urban landscape where the sounds of the surrounding city provide an ambient score and the absence of other people in most scenes suggests an environment that is both desolate and private.

In Between Days also made me think of the cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, particularly Millennium Mambo. In that film, Hsiao-Hsien also chronicles the changing emotions of a young girl, though Shu Qi is slightly older and a touch more glamorous in the role than Jiseon Kim is in In Between Days. So Yong Kim's film is the more everyday side of that story, wracked with more pain, and possibly more life altering for how small the catalysts for change really are. The bumps Aimie experiences along the way are tiny in comparison to the drastic decision she makes at the end of the picture, and the tears in her eyes during that final shot are not for what she lost, but how ill-prepared she was for the next stage.

AMERICA AMERICA - FILMSTRUCK

This review originally ran on DVDTalk.com in 2011.

Elia Kazan had already had a long and distinguished--and oft controversial--career in both theatre and cinema by the time he made his most personal film, America America, in 1964. Known for making pictures that pushed the envelope in terms of subject matter, be it challenging moral taboos or exploring socially conscious issues, the filmmaker didn't necessarily abandon those things for his immigration epic, but he found a way to make them more directly about himself and where he came from.

America America is, at its core, a family story. Kazan wrote it as a tribute to his uncle, first in a book and then as this screenplay. Said uncle emigrated from Turkey to the United States in the early 20th century. The cinematic version starts out in 1896. Stavros Topouzoglou (newcomer Stathis Giallelis) is the eldest son in a poor Greek family living in the Anatolian Mountains. As Kazan tells us himself in an introductory voiceover, the area was known for a large Greek and Armenian population when the Turks moved in and took over. At the time of the story, both groups live under occupied rule, and recent Armenian activity has caused an ethnic crackdown. Though Stavros is Greek, he can't avoid being caught up in the unrest. He is business partners with the Armenian worker Vartan (Frank Wolff). They go into the woods together and get ice to sell back down in the village. They both dream of someday leaving Turkey and sailing the Atlantic to find new opportunities in the States.

Pinning their hopes on Stavros and with fingers crossed it might keep him from jail (or worse), the Topouzoglou family sends him to Constantinople with all of their valuable possessions and traditions. The plan is for him to join his uncle's business there and slowly bring the rest of the clan along once he starts making money. On his trek, he meets an opportunistic Turk (Lou Antonio) who chisels him out of all his goods, setting off a chain of events that puts the young boy way off course. Unable to take up with his uncle, he ends up on the streets trying to make his fortune, only to continually lose what little he makes, run afoul of violence, and generally screw up. The other men call him "America America" because that's all he can talk about--one day getting enough cash to go to the Land of Opportunity.

Unlike most immigrant stories, Kazan isn't concerned with what happens once Stavros finally gets overseas. This is the story of the long and difficult process of escape. America isn't a reality, it's a fantasy, an image in advertisements and on postcards. Stavros doesn't have a dream of doing anything when he gets there, his dream is just getting there. Opportunity will be opportunity, it doesn't matter what it is.

Kazan shot most of America America on location overseas. Though many of his previous films brought a new social realism into American cinema, as well as a new kind of performance--he worked with both Marlon Brando and James Dean, who became icons of method acting--America America has more in common with Italian Neorealists than it does A Streetcar Named Desire. Working with mostly unknown, untested talent, he was able to create a film that is grounded in naturalism, even as the script toys with more traditional storytelling, including the oral tradition that allowed family stories of this kind to be passed on from generation to generation.

Haskell Wexler's amazing black-and-white photography presents the harsh life without any varnish. The sets and locations can be majestic and elaborate, yet the poverty is evident. Most of the settings are broken down, and people live on top of one another. Likewise, the costumes are torn and dirty. We can see the effects homelessness has on Stavros. By contrast, glimpses of the finer side of life seem almost contrived. An American that Stavros briefly encounters looks like he pulled his immaculate period suit straight out of studio wardrobe. When Stavros joins a wealthy family, their life also looks like costume drama put together by a vast production team. Don't take that as a criticism. I think this was intentional on Kazan's part, he wanted to show how deep the divide between the classes and how unreal the reality of the upper crust could be.

These finer things are just another temptation to Stavros, and temptation is just a distraction. Also, short cuts are a danger. Surprisingly (or maybe not so), women prove to be the key to a lot of his actual success--and fittingly, the actresses in the movie stand out. Linda Marsh is heartbreaking as Stavros' understanding and long-suffering spouse, and Katharine Balfour draws pity in a whole other way as a sheltered American wife. Ultimately, though, Stavros' path to success is reliant entirely on him. He must maintain focus and never waver from his goal. In this, America America is both a cautionary tale and statement of hope. One must never forget the struggles and sacrifice of those who have journeyed to the States in search of a better life, and how that goes deep down to the core of what the country stands for and what it was founded on. The actual achievement is not a fairy tale, it is not always clean or even honest, but the impulse to be a part of the great experiment is always worthy of tribute.

THE MARSEILLE TRILOGY: CESAR - #884

Though only made a few years after its predecessors, César moves The Marseille Trilogy forward nearly twenty years. Marcel Pagnol takes full control this time, both writing the original screenplay and directing. The results put the film somewhat at odds with itself. Of the three movies, César is the most comfortable in its own skin, yet so much so, it’s also a little too easy with itself and thus less realized, and at times even borders on self-parody when Pagnol is clearly pushing to deliver more of what everyone liked about Marius and Fanny [review].

The primary cast returns for this go-around, including Fernard Charpin as Panisse, the older sail maker who married Fanny (Orane Demazis) and accepted her son with Marius (Pierre Fresnay), Césariot, as his own. André Fouché (Playtime [review]) joins the film as the grown-up Césariot, and we are introduced to the boy as he returns home to visit Panisse on his deathbed. At the urging of the local priest (Thommeray), Fanny tells her son the truth about his parentage, stoking a curiosity in him. Who is this Marius, and why has he hardly been spoken of? And why doesn’t he have a relationship with his father, César (Raimu), who has been Césariot’s godfather this whole time?

Choice is an important driver in The Marseille Trilogy, and the choices made in Marius and Fanny come to consequence in César. Marius is justifiably upset by decisions that were made without his being kept in mind, but he also has to reckon with his willingness to go along. We find out that he and César fell out, and the older man has to wrestle with his decision to put his grandson ahead of his own child. And Fanny has to answer to Césariot for the years of deception. Not to mention Marius’ broken heart.

As is to be expected, Pagnol’s script really shines when it focuses on his principle characters in deep conversation. The past is scoured and hurt feelings exposed, and there is something compelling about listening to adults dig into actual emotions this way. They are unreliable and inconsistent in their expression, as most people are, and the flaws make them all the more real. Far less natural are the light-hearted scenes of César and his friends spending idle time together; a highlight of the first two films, they feel a little forced here.

Pagnol’s direction suffers from some of the stiffness of the early sound era, despite freeing his narrative from the stage origins of the first two films. His framing and the staging can be a little obvious, and the camera movements occasionally clumsy. Pagnol inherits less of the smooth hand of Marius-director Alexander Korda, and more of the realism of Fanny’s Marc Allégret. In fact, in a lot of ways, César feels like early Neorealism, with the film having an overall natural look and making use of the seaside locations to an even greater extent than Fanny.* It makes for an interesting mix, since much of the plot here, with Césariot visiting his father incognito and Marius’ business partner filling the boy with lies about their supposed life of crime, borrows from traditional comedies of error. This juxtaposition works incredibly well, with the tone being reminiscent of some of Jean Renoir’s best work.

Smartly, the auteur leans into the lighter side for his ending, making César a fine cap to the lengthy trilogy.

* A year before César, Marcel Pagnol also produced a short musical documentary called Marseille, showcasing the city and its culture. This short is included on the César disc.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

THE MARSEILLE TRILOGY: MARIUS/FANNY - #s 882-883

The Marseille Trilogy comes with a lot of history. These early French talkies are adaptations of Marcel Pagnol’s stage plays, helmed initially by other directors, but overseen by the writer, who would go on to direct the final entry himself (the only one not taken from a play). A successful film career for Pagnol followed, only for him to fall out of fashion in the 1950s until Francois Truffaut resurrected his reputation. At least amongst cinephiles. I remember seeing The Marseille Trilogy on the shelf at the video store where I worked, its boxes faded and dusty, their old-fashioned look perhaps contributing to their never being rented. I was another of the philistines who kept passing Pagnol by.

Then again, in the DVD age, one also couldn’t be blamed for sitting back and waiting with at least some fair confidence that a restoration was on its way. Wait long enough and all these things will come back around again, right? And there is plenty to watch in the meantime.

It’s funny to put it that way now, and also to consider that, in the intervening years (more than a decade at this point), I sometimes thought about those boxes. I can see them in my head--mostly white with pinkish lettering and black-and-white photos giving very little information about who Marius and Fanny and César might be--and every once in a while, perhaps when I’d see Pagnol or the trilogy mentioned, I’d wonder what maybe I’d missed.

Luckily, I was right and these things do come around, and Criterion has a new The Marseille Trilogy boxed set struck from 4K restorations that should look light years better than those old versions, and I can make up for lost time watching them in a state that represents how Pagnol and his collaborators intended. (In his video intro on the Marius disc, director Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de torchon) reflects on the damaged prints that were all that were available back in the day.) And I must say, it was worth the wait. The Marseille Trilogy is something extraordinary, an entirely human drama, arguably more novelistic than theatrical, wide in scope but careful in focus.

The first two movies in The Marseille Trilogy, Marius and Fanny cover about a two-year span, with the biggest time jump taking place in Fanny, its beginning overlapping with the conclusion of Marius, every bit the chapter 2 of a much longer narrative.

1932’s Marius, directed by Alexander Korda (That Hamilton Woman [review]), introduces us to our cast. Bar owner César (Raimu, The Pearls of the Crown [review]) and his son Marius (Pierre Fresnay, The Man Who Knew Too Much [review]); Marius’ childhood friend, Fanny (Orane Demazis, Les misérables [review]), a street vendor; the merchant Panisse (Fernard Charpin, Pépé le moko); and many more, a colorful gathering of different peoples brought together at the port in Marseille. Marius and Fanny have grown up to fall in love, though neither would admit it. Recently widowed, Panisse is looking to marry Fanny as a way to bring some happiness back to his home, something that will end up forcing the issue between the two younger people. The only hiccup is Marius’ wanderlust. He’s not interested in running his dad’s tavern, he wants to see the world.

What follows from this set-up is a very human drama, with people both acting in their own self-interests and then rejecting the same when it means someone else maybe deserves a better turn. Fanny ends up being the one ready to give up the most: she’ll let Marius chase his passion even if it means letting him go for several years. She’d rather miss him while he explores far-off lands than be responsible for his always wondering what else is out there.

Marius ends with Marius leaving for Australia, and Fanny explores what happens once he’s gone. Released a year later and directed by Marc Allégret, Fanny takes us deeper into the characters Marius has left behind, exposing their different sides, and revealing them not to be entirely what we originally expected. Perhaps most notable is the relationship between César and Panisse, a friendship that dates back to their days in school. In Marius, we saw them bicker harmlessly the way such old friends do; in Fanny, longer-held resentments surface from that bickering, but so too do we see how generous a nature they really have. Our allegiances shift more than once, but then, life often changes that way, doesn’t it?

“Life” is a key word here. Pagnol is a writer who lets his characters truly live. Though directed by others, Pagnol is really the author of these films, casting the actors and running the rehearsals and generally setting the course for how they would go. You can see the theatrical roots showing at times, particularly with Marius, where action is mostly confined to one location (most often, the bar) and driven by dialogue. Pagnol is not afraid to let scenes run long, to let conversations follow their natural course, long enough for characters to equivocate, expose their true feelings, and double-back on them. We get to know everyone in The Marseille Trilogy by spending time with them. For Pagnol, character is plot, and what each character does in relation to another is how he builds his story. The Marseille Trilogy is a great family epic, one that grapples with time and growth, rather than focusing on one driving narrative device. If it were a TV show, it would be a soap opera. Who loves whom and why, and what will they betray to make that person they love happy?

Not that The Marseille Trilogy is cliché or hokey (and not that soap operas have to be, despite the hokey clichés about them); rather, our investment in the participants means the drama is riveting. Any cliché turn Pagnol might take is less a fault of the material and more years of cinema and television that have come since preparing us for certain twists in this kind of material. It doesn’t really matter if you can see ahead to evident developments, though, as the getting there is always surprising.

Also, the acting is so good, you might find yourself wishing this were an ongoing series. Some of the best moments in both Marius and Fanny have nothing to do with the central story, but instead are sidebar instances where other characters are just spending time together. An hilarious card game with César, Panisse, and their friends in Marius is one of the most charming things you’ll see this, or any, year. Raimu shows himself a master of gesture, and he has an easy chemistry with all of his co-stars that will make you glad when Pagnol inserts other such scenes into Fanny. Special mention should also be made of Pierre Fresnay, whose Marius returns almost two years after he originally left, and though he has been transformed by his adventures, the actor merely matures the performance rather than making a hard shift into a different gear. We can believe that the confident, hardened Marius in Fanny is the same as the anxious and often capricious young Marius we saw in his own movie. The cinematography opens up, too, breaking out of the confines of interior locations, showing more of the seaside town.

Which makes me all the more interested to see where these characters end up in César, the final installment of The Marseille Trilogy, when Marcel Pagnol takes charge of the camera himself. But that’s something for its own review...

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

KITTY/DAWN - TWO SHORTS ON FILMSTRUCK/CRITERION CHANNEL

Two actresses who gained their initial fame in the 1990s have stepped behind the camera to make their own short films, each focusing on a young girl facing a life-altering change, but in very different ways.

Criterion fans will recognize Chloë Sevigny from Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco [review] and also had a featured role on the HBO series Big Love [review]. Kitty is her 2017 adaptation of a Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky) story. It stars Edie Yvonne as young Katherine, a.k.a. Kitty, a child who dreams of being a cat to such an impassioned degree, she eventually transforms into one.

Sevigny’s short is about the power of imagination, positive and negative. Childhood has both a light and a dark side, and while the girl Kitty finds happiness in her flights of fancy, the adults around her don’t share her whimsical vision. Even as the girl starts to slowly adopt the physical attributes of her namesake, her parents and neighbors fail to see what she sees, they have grown past such things--and to illustrate this divide Sevigny constructs her shots so that we can’t see their faces. It’s a bit like the Peanuts cartoons, all grown-ups are just out of frame, or shielded by something. It’s almost as if they consider Kitty too insignificant to bother.

This only changes when the metamorphosis is complete, but then only because Kitty is exiled for real, having embraced her imagined form in total. There is a bit of Roald Dahl here: by leaning into the magic, the child forever separates herself from the life she once had and can never fully return to the real world. Her choices have made her “different.”

Rose McGowan’s 2014 effort, Dawn, has a far more serious setting and a far darker outcome than Kitty. Known for her performances in both segments of Grindhouse [review] and the original Scream, McGowan has shifted her personal spotlight from acting to activism in recent years. Dawn illustrates some of the issues she has raised with Hollywood and our sexualized culture, but in a way that intrigues through storytelling rather than explicitly laying it out.

Set in the 1960s, Tara Lynne Barr (Hulu’s Casual) plays Dawn, a teenager experiencing her sexual awakening. Though warned against the hunky gas station attendant (Reily McClendon) who has caught her eye, when there’s no one around to chase him away, he and some friends come calling. Dawn decides to go with them into the woods, opening herself up to a violent fate, the doomed heroine of a true-crime fairy tale. (See also Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk.)

McGowan, working from a script by Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin, co-creators of Queen of the South, uses juxtaposition of two different worlds and points of view in much the same way as Sevigny--though here it’s the balance between the idyllic vision many have of 1960s rural America, and the modern sadism that lurks just underneath. In both cases, the shorts end with the titular characters being lead away by someone else, but only one finds happiness, the other finds tragedy.

I wouldn’t dare suggest that either outcome in any way suggests a difference between the filmmakers any more than these are just the stories they wanted to tell; rather, I think it’s more interesting to highlight the similar impulse that drives them. As actresses themselves, it makes sense that both Chloë Sevigny and Rose McGowan would choose tales that put their stars front and center, that highlight female characters driven by their particular desires and the center of their own narrative. Not relegated to the sideline as girlfriends or fetish objects, but true main characters.

On a side note, Rose McGowan was herself featured in an artful short film recently. The video for Luna’s cover the Cure’s “Fire in Cairo” is a tribute to her. Watch it for yourself below.

LA POISON - #891

Sacha Guitry can sure make murderous fantasies feel playful and fun.

Plowing similar territory as Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours [review] and Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style, the writer/director’s 1951 film La poison is a dark comedy about a married couple so sick of each other, they’d rather see the other dead than carry on with the charade. French superstar Michel Simon (L’Atalante [review], The Two of Us [review]) plays Paul Bracconier, a middle-aged husband in a small-town who has had enough of his wife of 30 years. She drinks three bottles of wine a day and is generally unpleasant to be around. Granted, Blandine (Germaine Reuver) is pretty sick of Paul, as well, and while he’s complaining to his priest and anyone who will listen, she’s buying enough rat poison to kill him seven times over. While Guitry’s sympathies clearly lie with Paul, from the looks of things, Blandine’s going to get him long before he gets her.

It’s certainly an amusing set-up, and one with enough comedy to build the whole script around, but luckily for us, Guitry goes deeper than that. La poison isn’t just about a married couple who are at each other’s throats, but it’s also about small-town gossip, religious and political hypocrisy, and one man’s hubris. Just as things are heating up at the Bracconier household, their neighbors are begging the same priest to whom Paul confessed to fake a miracle and drive tourism from Paris. Elsewhere, a defense lawyer (Jean Debucourt, The Golden Coach) is celebrating his 100th victory by crowing about his tenuous relationship with the concept of guilt. It’s his unique views about murder that provide Paul the morally grey justification to head his wife off at the pass--though as we’ll see, even the smartest barrister can’t save Paul from himself.

Michael Simon brings his usual gregariousness to the role. An enormous screen presence whose career spanned decades, from silent films through the Nouvelle Vague, Simon has a matter-of-fact way with the comedy of the situation. He can talk about killing his wife as if it was the most natural thing in the world, but he can also twist that same reasonable delivery into a dangerous self-satisfaction. It’s hard to tell whether to love or hate him in La poison’s finale. Part of you won’t blame him for his desires, even as his proclamations paint a far less appealing portrait than we’ve seen so far.

Guitry has fun with this, cutting away from Paul to show the reaction of others. In fact, the cutaway is his most common comedic tool. What goes on behind closed doors is often juxtaposed with what is going on outside of them. In their way, the other townspeople are accomplices to Paul’s crimes. Like the woman at the start of La poison who sits in the pharmacists examining other people’s prescriptions, they concern themselves more with the illness than the cure. They prefer the drama of the scandal to preventing the potential consequences. This is behavior that Guitry hardly sees as unique to rural communities; when Paul’s crime breaks wide, the filmmaker is indicting all of French society. Paul’s lawyer even puts a fine point on it: his job is secure as long as the press keeps promoting the crimes he defends and the public keeps eating them up.

Here, Guitry himself is a little guilty of having his cake and eating it, too, and I’m sure he’d be the first to admit it. In a meta sense, he is the biggest gossip of all, and takes the most joy in the deadly machinations of La poison. The joyous tone of the picture never gives way to a serious scolding, not even in the final scenes when he jumps between Paul’s testimony and the town’s impressionable children gleefully re-enacting what they’ve overheard from their parents--who themselves head off to Paul’s trial like tourists going to see a Broadway play. Other directors would use this old trick to shock us, to say look how horrifying this behavior and at who the resulting entertainment really corrupts. Not Guitry. He’s instead undercutting our own attraction to scandal and horror by noting how silly such base impulses can really be. In that sense, he’s not necessarily excusing Paul Bracconier, but implicating us in his creation and setting him up as the hero we deserve. I mean, aren’t we really rooting for him to get away with it?

In addition to a high-definition transfer, an interview with modern filmmaker Olivier Assayas, and a pair of documentaries about Guitry, this Blu-ray edition of La poison also boasts an original cover by renowned cartoonist/caricaturist Drew Friedman. If you don’t know Friedman’s work, seek it out, beginning with his books Old Jewish Comedians and Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

MEANTIME - #890

For those of us music fans who romanticize 1980s Britain, let Mike Leigh’s 1984 television movie Meantime be our wake-up call. Whether we dream of the beautifully dreary poetry of the Smiths and New Order or the New Romantic-glitz of early Duran Duran, our belief that it would have been an extraordinary time to be alive and English is based on a false ideal that borders on ghetto tourism. Sure, the hopelessness and boredom of Leigh’s tale is the same kind of situation that gave us Morrissey and Ian Curtis and Martin Gore, but it didn’t make philosophers and kings of everyone. We can hear the music without having to eek out an existence under Thatcher’srule.

Set in a London tenement, Meantime follows an out-of-work working class family--father, mother, and two adult sons--who struggle to get by, packed into a counsel estate apartment, living off unemployment. While Frank (Jeff Robert) has settled into a certain contentment doing nothing, largely enabled by his put-upon wife Mavis (Pam Ferris), his two boys are finding it hard to feel the hours ooze by without going mad. To cope, they go to opposite ends. Mark (Phil Daniels, Quadrophenia [review]) is caustic and confrontational, a prototype of David Thewlis in Leigh’s masterpiece, Naked, while Colin (Tim Roth, The Hit, The Hateful Eight) is quiet and withdrawn, and perhaps a bit behind developmentally. As we watch them kick against the nothingness across the length of Meantime, we will see the sibling dynamic at work, rivalry providing its own kind of support. Mark tears Colin down only to prop him back up (sort of).

Famous for improvising his material with his actors (Leigh is credited as having “devised” the film rather than having written it), Meantime’s drama is less plot and more situational. There are many scenes of doing nothing, of being trapped in the flat or down at the pub, the ennui inspiring cruelty, family and friends picking at each other. It’s a difficult dynamic to watch. Leigh risks inspiring annoyance in his audience, as well as a potential harsh reaction to how little these men seemingly do to help themselves. A scene down at the unemployment office sees both Frank and Mark abusing the woman who gives them their check; the opening of the film shows the family visiting middle-class relatives (Marion Bailey and Alfred Molina) and being passive-aggressively hostile toward their hospitality.

Yet, as we watch events unfold, it becomes clear that their idle state is not laziness, but a combination of defeat and pride. They have accepted that this is their lot, and there is little option for something better; at the same time, the few available options are pitiable scraps, more off-handed charity than considered solution. No one is offering them a viable choice to improve.

And while, yes, characters in Meantime can be annoying, watching them is anything but thanks to Leigh’s remarkable cast. While Daniels had plenty of work under his belt by this time, Meantime was a breakthrough for both Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, who plays Coxy, a brash skinhead. Oldman’s performance is physical, charismatic, and odd, his belching cadence predicting both his turn as Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy [review], and his many villain roles. Coxy is the perfect example of the wayward youth who gloms on to some kind of social movement or manufactured identity to mask his own weakness--which we catch a brief glimpse of in an unsettling scene where Coxy is called on his racist bullshit in an elevator. Oldman says little in the moment, but his vulnerability is evident in his face and body language. Alternately, Roth is restrained, his angst and anger all bottled up, presenting a false gentleness rather than a trumped-up bravado. In some ways, the actors would swap these roles a few years down the road in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Roth going nuclear and Oldman adopting a genial ignorance.

Leigh and director of photography Roger Pratt (Brazil, Mona Lisa) use the limitations of television to their advantage, achieving a lo-fi realism befitting the story. Shot on location, and contrasting the cramped apartments with the wide open spaces that these aimless young adults wander in search of something, anything to occupy the time, the outside world in Meantime is vast and endless, but offering no additional shelter or purpose, except to maybe make the characters feel smaller and more meaningless. (For contrast, see Oldman’s Coxy tucked into a big cylinder, trying to move, banging on the walls impotently...) Leigh’s England is as moody and gray as Joy Division’s, though a lot less tuneful. I don’t know if Andrew Dickson’s score is intentionally monotonous to match the repetition of the characters’ day-to-day, but its constant presence eventually serves to distract rather than enhance. But then, it’s also kind of emotionless to begin with.

All the more impressive, then, that Leigh ends Meantime so warmly, with Mark pulling his brother back from the brink after his pettiness sent Colin in the wrong direction. It’s an error corrected not even by kindness, but simply by devoting a moment to listen. Sure, the real ending suggests that once they are over that hump, the whole family will return to business as usual, but when every day is harsh, the small oases can mean a whole lot. Now if only the boys could take those brief bursts of energy and form a band....

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.