From Mike Leigh, another polished, flinty, brilliant fragment in the monumental mosaic of the Human Comedy. The fundamental and solid idea of the thing is to compare and contrast (back and forth, with no set plan) the personalities of two love-hungry girlfriends at two separate stages of their lives: their four-year stint as youthful London flatmates and their weekend reunion around the age of thirty, six years after their last parting. Their haphazard path-crossings, in the course of that weekend, with three comrades from their earlier lives are fortuitous to the point of forced, and two of them amount to little and nothing, respectively. Or to put it another way, there is little or nothing to compensate for the improbability. However, the third path-crossing, the first in order of occurrence, with an apathetic real-estate agent who fails to recognize the two roomies he had uncommittedly juggled several years back ("Vagina. Nice place. Wouldn't want to live there"), builds upon and deepens the element of adventure and amusement in so mundane an activity as house-hunting. Leigh has proven himself a dependable dowser in quest of that element. The revealed differences between the women's younger and older selves -- sufficient to justify the inability of their shared boyfriend to place the faces -- tell us a few things about the inner human potential for growth, change, passage. But one of the things we are told -- we who have so much more chance than the befuddled ex-boyfriend to assess the differences -- is that there are nonetheless limits. This is no Ugly Duckling fairy tale, no magical metamorphosis of the furry worm into the gossamer butterfly, no feminist success story. This is a Mike Leigh movie, and the view of humanity bores in mercilessly on the prison cell of personality. Sure, you can brighten the place up a bit, make it more comfy, come to feel more at home in it, but you can never step out of it at will, move over to the Hilton. Everyone in a Leigh movie is a kind or degree of cripple, and as such, as ripe for mimicry and for mockery as for compassion. Katrin Cartlidge, Lynda Steadman. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd