'Career Girls': A Job Well Done

What a perfect little gem of a movie Mike Leigh has made. Again.

While the British director has painted "Career Girls" with a narrower brush stroke than he’s used in such recent films as "Life Is Sweet," "Naked" and "Secrets & Lies," it’s still a masterful work and essential viewing for anyone who’s followed Leigh’s career.

Leigh uses a single relationship -- the friendship of two women -- to tackle the same issues (family ties, love, hate, compassion, loneliness, misery and hope) that he’s explored in his other works. The film opens with Annie (Lynda Steadman) on a train to London to visit Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge). It’s been six years since they’ve seen each other, six years since Annie moved out of their shared London flat to return to her mother’s house in the country.

We learn through flashbacks that the parting was not sweet (for reasons never explained), and when Annie gets off the train, you cringe at the awkwardness of their greeting. You’re immediately angry at the aggressive Hannah over how she treats Annie, and angry with Annie for instantly reverting to doormat status, intimidated by her overbearing friend. The tension on the drive from the station to Hannah’s apartment is nearly unbearable, with stilted small talk bouncing off the women’s defensive shields.

But the chitchat gives way to small intimacies, as Annie and Hannah slowly drop their guard and remember why they were friends in the first place. Flashbacks continuously give the audience reference points, and the friendship begins to take on emotional weight. Ten years before, they shared an apartment with two other women. It’s squalid, dark, cramped and depressing. The tenants are all around 20 years old and are either angry or blue. Annie and Hannah conspire to find their own place, and when they do, it’s just as squalid, dark, cramped and depressing.

The younger Annie’s face is scarred with dermatitis rendering her helplessly insecure and self-conscious. She tilts her head down, letting her dyed, scraggly hair fall in her face. The younger Hannah alternates between making fun of Annie and protecting her. Any kindness that Hannah lets slip, she quickly obliterates with the machine gun of her caustic rants. In different ways, they’re both outcasts, opposites drawn to each other.

Back in real time, during the London visit, Hannah is civil and funny, though still acerbic. Annie has gained poise and some measure of confidence. It’s during a casual chat over dinner at a Chinese restaurant that they suddenly plunge into honesty. Understanding starts trickling in, and each woman revisits memories with new awareness.

There’s Annie’s emotionally disturbed college classmate, Ricky (Mark Benton, in a gut-wrenching performance), who disappears after she painfully rejects him. There’s a rather slimy fellow who breaks Annie’s heart after he dumps Hannah for her. Each of these characters from the past reappears in the present, used by Leigh to make several points: the tricks of memory, the limits of compassion, the power of love and most important, how "time just goes," as Ricky says in a harrowing scene when they run across him again.

Both actresses are stunning in their portrayals of two women going through the hardest years of their lives. Cartlidge is particularly brilliant in showing both the physical and emotional changes that 10 years bring to Hannah.

Leigh, as usual, uses to great effect the environment to emphasize his points. His cramped interiors -- cars, apartments, elevators, restaurants -- contrast with the vast landscape of emotions inside the brain. With "Career Girls," he’s distilled everything he knows about the human spirit into 48 hours of two women’s lives; and watching them open up to each other, in small fearful steps, is a revelation. There’s no great catharsis when Annie gets back on the train with a promise to visit again -- the film has unfolded too steadily for a Hollywood ending -- but you’re left moved almost beyond words.

CAREER GIRLS (R) — Contains brief nudity and some profanity.