| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Disc 2
Subtle comedies of White despair that are the hallmark of LEIGH’s work to date. In Leigh-world, happiness - if it exists at all - is only fleeting or comes in spurts.
Mixed in with the lower-class archetypes is the usual middle-class envy at the poor’s apparently greater capacity for enjoying themselves. The general gormlessness and fecklessness of the males here is where so much of the humor originates and is a joy to behold.
The White middle-class characters here are shown as emotionally-overwrought hippie-types who are tiresome as all get-out because they think behaving according to highly-detailed rituals is a bulwark against the chaos of an unexamined life. One is left wondering what kind of non-nurturing childhood such people are so desperately keen to run away from.
The problem with these works is that they accurately describe retarded people, yet offer no effective resolution to their problems - nor, indeed, can the characters represented ever be any more interesting than their representations. This is drama as therapy, not as exploration or as analysis, since emotional-inbreeding is described but not really understood. Ingmar Bergman for kids.
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