At Cannes: Critics Swoon Over Mike Leigh's Another Year

Though early in the festival, Mike Leigh's touching drama Another Year, looks poised to grab an award after it received the most positive reviews so far from any film in competition. It's his best work since 1996's Secrets and Lies.

Hitting on themes of class, family, and depression, the touching drama looks at one year in the lives of a content, solidly middle-class family in North London. The film is broken up into chapters: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Tom (played by Oscar-winner and Leigh favorite Jim Broadbent), and his wife Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are an older couple very much in love. Gerri, a medical counselor, invites her friend Mary (Lesley Manville) over for dinner one evening, and a stark dichotomy is immediately cast between the life of a married couple and the life of a single person.

Divorcee Mary is utterly fragile, broken. She arrives at dinner, chatting a mile a minute, a nervous wreck and proceeds to get drunk. In the course of the evening, she unloads on her hosts, lamenting her lonely existence and broadcasting her massive insecurity. Tom and Gerri (yep, the names elicited chuckles from the Americans who remember the cartoon of the same name) are kind to Mary, perhaps too kind. They indulge her, act as her de facto therapists and help steer Mary away from her depressive thoughts.

As if Mary's condition isn't enough to handle for Tom and Gerri, Tom's friend Ken (Peter Wight) -- a heart attack waiting to happen -- comes down to visit them one weekend. Ken sports a T-shirt that says, "Less thinking... more drinking." He's obese, he chugs cans of beer, chain-smokes, plows through bags of chips, and he, too, unloads on his hosts. His solitary and miserable life is quite similar to Mary's. Thrown into the mix is Tom and Gerri's son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), who visits his parents. Mary hasn't seen Joe since he was 10 years old, but now that he's all grown up Mary can't help but feel an attraction to the much-younger man. She awkwardly (and pathetically) flirts with him during another of her many visits to Tom and Gerri's home, and asks him out for a drink.

Leigh is firmly in his element here, and the way in which the film deftly handles familial angst and humdrum daily survival is incredibly satisfying.

He addressed the press, but the press conference got off to a rocky start. The first question was given to Richard Brooks, the arts editor of the London Sunday Times. Brooks began by saying he liked the film very much, but Leigh cut him off mid-question. "I'm sorry, I refuse to answer a question from you," Leigh said. When Brooks asked why, Leigh responded sternly, "You know why."

After that bumpy opening, Leigh was quite charming (to everyone else). In explaining his vision, he said, "I've always been concerned -- for as long as I've been making films and stage plays -- with celebrating and enjoying the lives of ordinary people."

The film is bookmarked by the seasons of the year, and it's a device that wonderfully frames the drama. "Here we tried to create a world where you really feel the seasons," said Leigh. "You feel the air they're breathing, you feel that connection with the earth, and you see it. And it should resonate with what ordinary people's lives are about."

Though we see the depressive side of life in many of Leigh's film -- this one included -- Leigh himself isn't one to take a dim view. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, "life is fascinating. We are endlessly fascinating; people aren't boring." Certainly Leigh's films aren't either.