'Career Girls': Life's Little Glories

When they are good, they are very very good. And when they are bad -- oh, hell, they're never bad.

That would be Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman, the stars and fonts of charisma driving Mike Leigh's brilliant new comedy "Career Girls."

A study of female bonding, it illustrates a deep truth: Lifestyles may come and go and levels of prosperity may rise and fall, but friendship is forever. Still, spiffy and upbeat as that very nice message is, it's not what you'll take from the film.

Rather, "Career Girls" is one of those performance-driven pieces in which the central miracle is the totality of becoming that is achieved not only by each actress but by each actress twice, at different stages of the characters' lives. All sense of pretend is exiled, all notion of acting vanished. The two actresses simply assume the characters, and their own personalities vanish entirely.

Moreover, Leigh, as he did in "Secrets & Lies" and "Naked," evokes a much denser sense of reality at the micro-level: all the nattering and whining, all the cackling and static normally banned from dramatic representations of reality are here in their comic purity.

It's a reversal of somebody's famous remark that movies are life with the boring parts cut out; somehow, Leigh's work in general and "Career Girls" in specific is about the boring parts, except that they're so specifically evoked they never feel boring.

The movie intertwines two time periods: the present and six years ago. So vast are the differences between then and now that it takes some time before you realize you are watching the same pair, unformed, twitchy and unkempt in the rawness of youth, then glazed by time, experience, a little bit of success and better makeup in the smoothness of middle-age.

In ancient times (the '80s), Hannah (Cartlidge) was a sharp-tongued guerrilla of the counterculture, an avatar of sexual aggression and radical ideas under a pointed chin, a spritz of tendrilly hair and eyes so sharp they could see through everything. Now, in her trim power suits and sensible low heels, she's very much the business exec whose course through life is as well-plotted as an RAF raid. Annie (Steadman) was a sad sack of a mumbler, with downcast eyes and an upcast hand. The hand was upcast to ward off a solid view of the skin disease that turned a quadrant of her face into a strawberry patch and turned her confidence to pureed liver, but of course in the way these things inevitably work, the hand displays rather than disguises the blemish. More passive, she was also sweeter and more hapless; now she's bloomed into the radiance of her thirties with clear skin and even clearer eyes.

But it's very much a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same; soon enough, Hannah and Annie have reestablished the same slightly demented relationship, where Hannah dominates and sets agendas but Annie snipes and disobeys orders in small ways. The setting is London, where they were university roommates and where Hannah is now hunting for a new flat while enjoying a visit from Annie, whom she hasn't seen in six years.

As they wander the city, they keep encountering relics of a past that is gone but hardly forgotten and, in fact, so well remembered that the movie re-creates them in telling detail. Only here does a sense of storyteller's artifice intrude: the two women are extremely lucky in the chance encounters into which they bumble -- old boyfriends seem to figure a lot, though I suppose it could be argued that, if you are a woman, indeed the world is full of old boyfriends.

At the same time, Leigh isn't a formal storyteller in the professional sense, nor is he a professional comedy writer who can set up a deft three-act plot arc and smoothly slide you through it. He's more of a behaviorist, interested in the scratchy ways people interact at the most intimate levels and how they squabble always for small morsels of power while simultaneously yearning for love.

The movie therefore proceeds anecdotally. Hannah and Annie encounter a lovely shy stutterer who was a part of their set; alas, he's drifted further into the margins and his feckless fate lends a cast of poignancy to the enterprise. Another chap, momentarily an issue between the two of them, remembers neither and has turned into a slick real estate hustler. He just wants to let a place, although, come to think of it, he wouldn't mind if they let him into bed once again. It is a measure of their new wisdom that his ways, once so beguiling, seem so utterly transparent and self-absorbed that they can howl in laughter at his crudity.

The movie is in that way jittery, and seems inconsequential because you keep waiting for something "big" to happen. Then it dawns: Big is for movies, little is for life. And it's the crackling sense of littleness with which "Career Girls" gloriously seethes.

Career Girls is rated R for profanity and occasional nudity.