CAREER GIRLS

In CAREER GIRLS, Annie (Lynda Steadman) sits in a train, preoccupied with her thoughts and recollections. When the train stops in London, she seems nervous but joyful and meets up with an old friend Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), who is fraught with similar emotions. Annie spends the weekend with Hannah. On the first evening, the two awkwardly talk about what each other has been doing. They exchange career stories, boyfriend stories (or the lack of boyfriend stories), and parental sufferings while sizing up each other’s current status.

Alternating between the past and present, the film occasionally transports the viewer back in time to when Annie and Hannah first met as roommates in a dingy apartment building. Annie, her face scarred with dermatitis and suffering from low self-esteem, drops her eyes and twitches nervously when she speaks to others. Hannah is caustic, cynical and high-strung – traits she keeps in the present.

As the story shifts between past and present gears, Annie and Hannah experience tight bonding with each other. As students, they are both sympathetic to each other’s love and sex lives. When Annie rebuffs fat, sloppy Ricky (Mark Benton) and feels guilty about it, Hannah supports and comforts her. When Hannah realizes that Annie has a crush on Adrian (Joe Tucker), with whom Hannah is having a sexual fling, she does not object.

Throughout the weekend, the girls recapture the bonding that existed when they were roommates, meet by chance with Ricky and Adrian, and part ways, knowing that they are still close, but now leading separate lives.

The same acting force that was present in British director, Mike Leigh’s earlier and much more powerful Academy-award winning SECRETS & LIES is also evident in CAREER GIRLS. Unlike SECRETS & LIES, which had a more substantial storyline, CAREER GIRLS examines a friendship that is more normal and mundane in its trials and tribulations. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, its lack of surprises and harder-edged truths makes CAREER GIRLS ultimately unmemorable.

Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman put meat on their roles both as students and as mature career girls, and their bonding evokes wistful memories of youth’s raw insecurities. Their acting and the movie’s polish under the skilled creativity of Mike Leigh could have made CAREER GIRLS a strong character driven film as each of the principal characters undergoes transition from student to adult. Regrettably, Annie and Ricky have one too many twitches and tics which reduce, more than reinforce the peculiarities of the characters involved. Only Hannah’s many angry physical gestures work, embodying her cynicism.

Despite the overall good acting, sharp wit and precise dialogue, CAREER GIRLS is too liberal with drugs, drinking and promiscuity. The lives they reflect are inward and self-centered, with no reaching out for morals and goals beyond their self-preoccupation. The movie is an introspective journey of the self and of a friendship, but there is an obvious lack of maturity. Hannah and Annie feel as lost and empty as Ricky and Adrian. Their emptiness speaks volumes about their lack of an inner spiritual self.