Career Girls (1997)

Very disappointing...

Awesome Movie

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

First time i saw this film (a few years ago) I thought it was dreadful. Irritating actors doing irritating characters doing irritating acting.And having seen it again they're still irritating.There must come a point in Mike Leigh's much vaunted "method" of character improvisation where he loses objective judgement; he's so closely, and myopically, caught up in the whole process he can't see how parodic his actors "charactering" is becoming.There's a scene in a pub illustrates how embarrassingly bad this improvised method can get; you've got social phobic psychology student Annie (Lynda Steadman) flittering away with fidgety fingers over itchy twitchy face; sat next to her is fellow psychology student, fat Ricky, spluttering and stammering with wild flailing blind arms like somebody with jerky Aspergers; and opposite is cynical Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) sneering with quotation mark emphasis at their "pretentious psychobabble" doing a mocking beaky hand thing. Tics and fidgets and jerks gone galorious – and non of it is meant to be being "funny". It's not p--s-taking you're seeing, it's seriously intended role-playing. But i thought to myself: this is just mimic mania gone mad; parodic mannerism has now subsided into ridiculous pantomimic absurdity. It was like witnessing Neurosis overload; these 3 hapless actors in a Mike Leigh film had just allowed themselves to be turned into grotesque caricatures, riddled with hopelessly unfunny autistic distortions of Tourettes syndrome.Oh dear. I've seen this neurotic OTT grotesquery before in Mike Leigh films; how ruinously afflicted Jane Horrocks was by it in Life is Sweet (and Timothy Spall too); Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies with all her self-pitying "sweed arts" and "darlins" got pretty close to unbearable too. I suppose its par for the course. You have to expect that Mike Leigh films come with this trademark neurotic – bordering on mental illness - characterisation. Sometimes it leads towards heartfelt Pathos. And sometimes it veers off into something unbearably unbelievably Pathetic. Which unfortunately it does for big chunks of this film, especially in the retrospective flashbacks to when they were playing themselves as "immature" polytechnic students.In the other - friends reunite – half of the film the tics and twitches have calmed down or grown up a bit. Annie is still doing that mad eyed down turned petrified stare when stressed or confronted; Hannah has stopped doing the beaky hand thing, but the sour antipathy hasn't really sweetened any, its just found less obvious streams in which to curdle; she's professionalised her cynicism, forged a career for herself out of the energy of her anger. Ricky, however, hasn't survived – he's gone full on bonkers. One of life's sad little causalities, left to wander off on his own down the career-less path to nowhere.I suppose thinking about it i did feel a bit more in sympathy with the general premise of the film this time: the whole reflecting back on how we once were, and what we now like to think we've become, how much better or improved we like to seem to ourselves, while knowing all the while – deep down – that nothing much has changed about us at all, and nothing ever will. We're more or less stuck with our silly little selves for the duration.Mind you, at least i'm not stuck inside a character in a Mike Leigh film for the duration. Lol. That would be purgatory!

Before you watch a Mike leigh Film you must first forget you ever saw a Hollywood Movie. the only thing they share is celluloid. Career girls takes place in a world so far from hollywood that its as different from it as a book is from a Play. Its hard to credit the acting in it as the people seem so incredibly real and yes it may appear dull and overly realistic for peroids but Mike Leigh never fails to hit the mark in what are usually quite short films. Sometimes the position of the mark is up to the viewer to decide but one thing is certain is these people will have to get up tomorrow cause lifes issues cannot be solved in a 90 minute segment. their direction may be a bit clearer of if it was clear it may be more confused. if nothing else as a man in my mid thirties it made me think of some of the people that flitted in and out of my life at various time through college different jobs and so on. and yes i could relate to the Rick figure , not every one will turn out all right. every 'Bum' on the street has had a past life and many of them very different to how you now see them Life can sucks but there is always hope and there no one better than Mike leigh to show that

***Spoiler may be here***I enjoy Mike Leigh's movies. Sometimes you get the feeling you are watching an awkward moment on somebody's home movies.Career Girls follows the six year reunion of college roommates, and unlikely friends, Hannah and Annie. We see Hannah and Annie now refined in their older age, but, as they flashback to their flat mate days, we see two spastic girls.Annie visits Hannah in London, and, in the first flashback, Annie recalls meeting Hannah as she moves into the flat. Hannah is mean and outspoken, and you wonder why Annie would ever want to be her friend--especially, as Hannah makes fun of Annie's eczema on her face. But they soon become friends--sometimes it is hard to watch these women. Annie jerks her head to the side and shakes with shyness while Hannah talks on the top of her lungs and flings her arms about. And, if you watch carefully, both revert to these nervous behaviors as adults in certain scenes.I was waiting for the big revelation, but it was nothing, really. Hannah and Annie run into ex roommates and boyfriends during their weekend reunion--and one ex doesn't even remember them. Everybody their age has married and moved on. But these girls are outcasts. And in the end, you can see life has been unfair to them, except in their careers.This type of movie is not everybody's cup of tea, and there is some thick English accents here. But if you want to know how to turn Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights into some sort of magic eight ball, this is the movie for you!

As a life-long Mike Leigh fan, I first saw CAREER GIRLS on its cinema release a couple of years ago. No, it didn't make quite the same impact as (for example) NAKED or SECRETS AND LIES, but nonetheless it does boast impressive and detailed performances from its lead actors. Katrin Cartlidge's work was always intense and magnetic (I was lucky enough to see her on stage in Theatre de Complicite's MNEMONIC in 1998) - and her recent, tragic death from septicaemia in September 2002, aged 41, was a desperately sad loss to top-notch acting and independent film making.