Mike Leigh - Meantime (1984)

Although in their early twenties, Colin (Tim Roth) and his sarcastic manipulative brother Mark (Phil Daniels) still live with their parents Mavis and Frank Pollack in a housing project in the East End. With Colin and Mark endlessly harassing each other like teenagers, the family endures unemployment, poverty and the hardship of life in early 1980s Britain. Enter Coxy (Gary Oldman), a violent local skinhead who befriends Colin, and add a job offer for Colin from a rich aunt and family tensions eventually erupt into jealousy and conflict. First shown on television, it is a memorable and closely observed account of life in Thatcher's Britain.







'Meantime' is a modernist masterpiece, closer to Antonioni than Loach, all the more remarkable for having been made on TV, and transcending the incidentals of portentousness, contrivance and misogyny. Leigh doesn't simply record the monumental, faceless, soulless tenements that dwarf his characters, as a social-realist would: he allows them to shape his narrative, a rigid, static series of concrete tableaux. Leigh doesn't reduce his characters to caricature (a complaint often levelled against him) - Thatcherism did, by removing all those things - hope, work, dreams etc. - that mark humanity and individuality. (IMDB user comment)









Aunque ya veinteañeros, el simplón Colin y su hermano sarcástico y manipulador, Mark, todavía viven con sus padres en una vivienda municipal en el barrio del East End en Londres. Colin y Mark se comportan como adolescentes mientras que la familia sufre el desempleo, la pobreza y las penurias de la vida en la década de 1980 en Gran Bretaña. También está Coxy, un skinhead violento que se hace amigo de Colin, y la tía rica Bárbara, que le ofrece un trabajo a Colin y desata tensiones familiares que finalmente estallan en celos y conflictos.







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