Career Girls

Mike Leigh's eagerly awaited follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies begins in the present day, as Annie (Lynda Steadman) journeys to London by train to meet Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), her former roommate; the film then flashes back repeatedly to their college days, contrasting the characters' gawky, uncertain former selves with the (slightly) more self-possessed and confident demeanor they project nowadays, as they gradually work to re-establish their earlier intimacy. As always with Leigh, there's plenty of funny dialogue and many insightful moments...but for the first time, he seems to be verging on self-parody. Hannah and Annie appear reasonably normal, if faintly odd, in the warmly-lit present-day scenes, but in flashback their nervous tics are so pronounced that it's easy to imagine them as comedy-sketch exaggerations of typical Leigh characters on an English equivalent of Saturday Night Live. Even the supporting characters are so uniformly spastic that watching a group of them together is like watching marionettes being manipulated by puppeteers with varying disorders of the central nervous system. The result is frequently as irritating as it is entertaining. Optional. (M. D'Angelo)[DVD Review—Sept. 20, 2005—Fox, 87 min., R, $9.98—Making its first appearance on DVD, 1997's Career Girls—available in both widescreen and full screen versions on the same disc, sports a nice transfer and Dolby Digital surround sound with the lone DVD extras being trailers. Bottom line: a disappointing extras package for a lesser Leigh film that completists will want to add, but is optional for others.]