I was looking on YouTube for "Kes" because I didn't want to leave the warm fireplace and go outside to my "movie house" where I keep my huge collection of DVDs - including "Kes" - when, under the heading "People also watched", YouTube brought up the mysterious-sounding title ""Meantime (1983)". What a discovery!
I had never heard of this movie, let alone of its director, Mike Leigh, the "satirist of the suburbs", who has produced a huge body of work that is idiosyncratic, controversial, often hilarious and always acutely sensitive to the human condition.
Told in a series of connected episodes, "Meantime" focuses on the Pollock family. They are working class and live in a flat in an East End tower block. As the United Kingdom’s economy is ravaged by the Thatcher-induced recession, the family struggles to keep afloat.
Because this family, like so many others, has had nothing but their work to define them, when they lose the ability to labor, it causes them to lose their identity. Humans want to contribute to the collective; it’s in our DNA; we want to know we matter in the places we live. When you remove that, you drive people towards nihilism, anger, and ultimately the atomization of any possible solidarity. It’s like being the living dead, in a way. Life is drained of colour, and relationships become conflicts at the drop of a hat.
If you are concerned with movie plots, you will find little here. It’s about the conversations, the quiet moments, the solemnity of a look through teary eyes. Even though you might not want to spend all day in the Pollock home, we end the film feeling love for them, hoping life gets better, and wanting to see them have one success someday. It may never come, but in the persistence of people to live, to try and help each other, there is hope that a better day may happen.
The title of the movie takes on multiple meanings. "Meantime" can be this pause from labour, an aside from life as it keeps rushing by. It’s also reflective of the way the characters treat each other. It’s a time of being cruel to one another, watching solidarity go down the drain.
I'll be watching more of Mike Leigh's movies.
