Leigh serves up adult drama about aging and loss

CANNES, France (AP) — Aging and mortality are at the heart of Mike Leigh's latest relationship drama, a smart and troubling examination of the way ordinary people cope with the vicissitudes of life.


"Another Year" — which screened at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday — looks at a group of middle-aged friends as they grapple with loneliness, love, loss and change over the four seasons of a single year.
It's a tribute to the talent of the British director and his outstanding cast — including Leigh regulars Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen and Lesley Manville — that the film manages to be funny and charming despite its heavy subject matter.
"Life does become clearer and more complicated" with age, the 67-year-old filmmaker told a news conference. "I would suggest the film doesn't, as it were, have solutions, as you say it, simply I hope raises feelings to have about how we deal with life."
The movie focuses on the relationship between Mary (Manville), a divorced secretary desperately seeking love and companionship, and her happily married friends, Tom (Broadbent) and Gerri (Sheen). As the couple gardens, entertains and tends to their friends, Mary attempts to drown her sorrows in endless bottles of wine and eyes Tom and Gerri's 30-year-old son.
Manville delivers a remarkable performance, her face registering pain, disappointment and the occasional flash of hope through her character's perpetual alcoholic fog.
"I'd never played drunk before so it was new territory," Manville said. "Sort of staying in a drunk frame of mind (between takes) helped me."
"Another Year" is one of 19 films competing for the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the French Riviera film festival. Leigh's drama "Secrets and Lies," about a white collar black woman who discovers that her mother is a working class white woman, won the prize in 1996.
Asked why his movies generally focus on everyday people in distress, Leigh quipped that he didn't know anyone without problems.
"When I meet those people, I'm happy to make a film about them. Until that time comes, I'll continue with the naive assumption that everyone has problems," he said.