"This is the life, innit, sweethearts?"
Widow Cynthia Purley is a woman doomed by fear and insecurity. Over the hill and over-involved in the lives of her now grown son and daughter, she's become a product of isolation and despair, unwilling to confront being left alone. Loving and considerate her children may be, her son Maurice and live-in daughter Roxanne are frustrated by their weepy mother's pandering intrusiveness, equally desirous to have their hands untied. Both have their own lives now, Maurice with his wife Monica, a new home and photography business and Roxanne, who despite living with Cynthia, is increasingly occupied with her job and new boyfriend. Meanwhile, not too far across town, Hortense Cumberbatch has just lost her adoptive mother to cancer. Resolving to seek out her birth mother after 30 years, Hortense goes through the process of locating her real family in between shifts at her optometrist practice only to find the results too far-fetched to believe. The records show Hortense, who's black, to have a mother who's white. When double-checks and second opinions confirm this as the actual truth, Hortense bravely decides to seek out her real mom for the first time.
Known as your favorite director's favorite director, Mike Leigh has long been one of the world's most influential filmmakers, his deeply intimate films revealing an unprecedented vision of dramatic realism. While at the center of this moving film are of two women--one bold, the other frail--mutually encountering a daunting truth, it's the peripheral characters, specifically Roxanne and Maurice, who complete the drama. Maurice played by Timothy Spall may be the only thing standing between Cynthia and the deep end, his shaky stability practically the fulcrum by which the family stays afloat. And yet his own life is weighed down by convictions of personal inadequacy and self-doubt, perpetually confronted with a wife unable to give birth and a need to sustain his teetering photo business. Seemingly held back by her circumstances, Roxanne might have the incentive but lacks the direction and most of all the means to get out from under. The story's ultimately defined by its two leads though, the culminating meeting and revelation between Cynthia and Hortense portrayed as an intensely awkward but wholly believable circumstance. (DVD SECRETS)
No comments:
Post a Comment