Mike Leigh’s debut behind the camera is far from being bleak. It is indeed, but it’s also hilarious, extremely witty, and admittedly quite political. On show is the aphasic awkwardness stereotypical of the postwar culture of the done thing—a ‘neurotic mantra,’ as described by Leigh1, that shaped the British middle class for about three decades through a code of social habits accepted as proper. Communication is the idea, or rather a projection of one, around which the narrative of the film orbits, and of course its characters. A professor, a communicator by profession, who can’t articulate his interest in a woman loses himself in aimless lucubrations on the communicative value of textile design. A hippie loner working as a duplicator for an indie magazine dreams of making a living with his music. A woman escapes her disastrous social efforts seeking a connection with the spirits instead. Another attractive woman, lone sherry drinker, would like to be a writer. Her invalid sister is ironically the only one in the bunch inhibited by her physical condition as opposed to self-conscious restraints or, again, the received notion of how she should behave. Meaningfully, the film opens on Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2—a classical tune poorly played on an old piano. But these characters are particularly representative of their time, not just for the social spectrum they portray. While the adults chronically fail to find themselves at ease and go about either sporting their clumsiness or criticising any unconventional behaviour, there’s a rather greasy youngster who sings of drugs and freedom, and whose shy ambitions are already mining a structure that’s become obsolete and, as we well know today, will bring his generation far.
1. From the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of Abigail’s Party (Penguin, 2017).
