Edna Doré's birthday is coming up. She's a feeble old widow living in a house in a gentrifying bit of London. We encounter her posh neighbors, her Marxist son, her upwardly mobile sot of a daughter, their partners, a couple of neighbors, and a guy wandering around looking for a job. Mostly she seems out of it.
It's a movie written and directed by Mike Leigh, which means, in this period, that it doesn't seem to have been written at all, just an assortment of people who run into each other and and act awkwardly with each other, like the Method actor's advice: don't act, behave. But how do you behave when it turns out you don't kow how to behave?
It doesn't appear to be a story, except that it is, centering on Miss Doré's son, played by Phil Davis, and his live-in girlfriend, played by Ruth Sheen. It's a beautifully realized relationship. I guess that's how Leigh wrote it.
It's a movie written and directed by Mike Leigh, which means, in this period, that it doesn't seem to have been written at all, just an assortment of people who run into each other and and act awkwardly with each other, like the Method actor's advice: don't act, behave. But how do you behave when it turns out you don't kow how to behave?
It doesn't appear to be a story, except that it is, centering on Miss Doré's son, played by Phil Davis, and his live-in girlfriend, played by Ruth Sheen. It's a beautifully realized relationship. I guess that's how Leigh wrote it.