# Career Girls (1997)

### reviewed by
James Sanford

Director Mike Leigh's "Career Girls," the follow-up to his American breakthrough "Secrets & Lies," is a perfect example of his improvisational style. His method of filmmaking is to give his actors an idea for a scene --- a starting point --- and to let them run with it. As a result, Leigh's movies tend to be full of spontaneity and color and low on narrative drive.

In "Career Girls," you'd be hard-pressed to find a traditional plot. It's an aimless but amiable little portrait of two Englishwomen who lived together for four years during the Eighties and are reunited for a weekend ten years after their split-up. Back in University days, Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman) had little in common, aside from a shared love for the music of The Cure and a fondness for using a copy of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" as a sort of oracle for fortelling their futures. The rundown little flat they shared overtop a Chinese takeaway is far removed from the upscale condos and luxury apartments Hannah is now shopping for.

In the initial flashbacks to the women's younger days, it looks as if Leigh may have let Steadman and Cartlidge run a bit too wild. Plagued by a serious case of facial determititus, Annie is a twitching bundle of loose nerves, while Hannah (she insists that it be pronounced "Hah-NAH" initially) is strident and self-dramatizing. Neither seems like a real person so much as an actor's exaggerated concept of a character type, and these early scenes play like sketches lifted from "The Tracey Ullman Show."

But as Cartlidge and Steadman find the right levels, "Career Girls" develops into an insightful meditation on the nature of friendship, as well as a peek into the psyches of two people who think they've dealt with the past but have actually only pushed it aside. Both women have plenty of unresolved issues that seem to keep getting in the way of their finding true happiness and peace of mind, and each is a bit envious of the other. The bird-voiced and retiring Annie admires Hannah's forthrightness and drive; Hannah, who's almost always hiding behind some sort of a front, confesses, "I'm not strong enough to be as vulnerable as you."

The poignancy of moments like that offset the occasional contrivances that develop late in the film: There are at least two too many run-ins with faces from the past, and an encounter with a former flatmate who's now a jabbering derelict goes on long after it makes its point. Leigh is most successful when he simply let Steadman and Cartlidge work their quiet magic together, without distractions. James Sanford

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