A PUBLICITY IMAGE for Another Year, which premiered at Cannes on Saturday night, shows Jim Broadbent, an old cap on his old head, sheltering from the rain on his well-tended allotment. You don't need a PhD in film studies to deduce that you are looking at the new film from Mike Leigh.
Sure enough, this moving, funny movie — as ever, improvised by the cast — delivers everything you would expect from the Salford master. Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play Tom and Gerri (get it?), a scruffy middle-class couple living a largely contented life in north London. By day, they tend carrots in the suburbs. By night, they cook arrabiata and drink wine. Over the space of a year, much drama (but no melodrama) takes place.
Leigh has always been interested in those women – Sally Hawkins in Happy Go Lucky, Alison Steadman in Life is Sweet– who offer stability and reassurance to their battier friends and family members. Here, the reliable human fulcrum is a couple, but the dynamic remains much the same. Nobody else seems to have time for poor Mary (Leslie Manville), a neurotic colleague of Gerri's, but when she needs a couch to get drunk upon, they open their doors and listen patiently to her whinges and her fantasies.
To say that Another Yearfits the Leigh template would be to understate the case. Cast almost entirely with regular collaborators – Imelda Staunton and Phil Davis offer cameos – the picture could be mistaken for the lost master key, from which all Leigh projects have been struck. It is, however, as affecting as any picture he has made over the past decade.
Painted in shades that vary to chime with the passing seasons, cut to beautifully melancholic music by Gary Yershon, the film accrues psychological detail steadily until, after enduring a slow start, viewers find themselves fully inducted into a new circle of flawed friends.
Though every character is given his or her moment, Leigh’s mediation on ageing and loneliness ultimately belongs to poor deluded Mary. As heartbreaking as it is deliberately infuriating, Manville’s performance could well secure her the best actress prize when Cannes ends next Sunday.
