Another Year
I sat and watched Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010) yesterday, because it was Sunday, I'd done my writing for the day, I'd fixed myself Sunday lunch on a tray, and I needed a way not to miss the family. Possibly not the best choice, then, a Mike Leigh film. I was intrigued by the Imelda Staunton cameo at the beginning, and thought it was going to be a story about counselling. However, Imelda turns out to be a red herring, sadly, or perhaps a framing device. Her cameo appearance represents the professional life of the main protagonist, Gerri, a counsellor. The four-seasons structure Leigh uses, around the life of an allotment (our allotted life, its circularity, its cyclicality) is a very old trope. It would shade into unbearable saccharine cliché, were it not that in Mike Leigh's hands, cliché itself is something to turn over in your hands, of which to scratch the surface, flake off a little dust. The allotment gives Gerri and her husband Tom produce and pleasure all y...