Almost too aptly titled, Mike Leigh’s debut film Bleak
Moments revolves around Sylvia, a thirty-something secretary in a small
accounting firm who lives with her developmentally-challenged sister Hilda, being
very slowly and ineffectually wooed by Peter, a teacher. Anne Raitt is
fascinating as Sylvia, sometimes strikingly severe looking, as if about to step
into a Gothic melodrama, probably overly reliant on cigarettes and sherry, but
with ample hints of a playful inner life, a faint smile drifting across her
face as she softly tweaks the conversation with comments that don’t quite find
an audience (such as introducing herself as the President of Venezuela, or asking
a visitor if he wants some nuts before admitting she doesn’t have any). The
lives on display are all highly constrained: by their drab and cramped living
and working spaces; by inescapable circumstances (Sylvia’s colleague and friend
Pat joylessly cares for her bed-ridden mother); by hang-ups and anxieties (Peter
seems to find every word a struggle, regurgitating things he read in books
without conveying any deep engagement with them); by sexual naivete and
inadequacy (there’s no sex in the film, but that’s the point). It frequently
shudders with awkward silences: a date night between Peter and Sylvia, depicted
in excruciating detail, moves from the most atmospherically challenged Chinese
restaurant imaginable to a strangulated and somewhat poignant aftermath in
Sylvia’s living room. But Leigh also allows glimpses of small beauty and
possible transcendence: Sylvia and Hilda are both captivated by the tentative
but sincere singing and guitar-playing of a man who rents their garage, and Pat
is drawn to a faith-healing group, becoming convinced that Hilda might find a
cure there. Sylvia vehemently opposes this fancifulness (it’s the most emotion
she displays about anything) but the ending suggests she may be tacitly
allowing Pat to take a shot, a concession more likely however to extinguish one
of the film’s few shards of hope than to fulfil it.
No comments:
Post a Comment