CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Annie (Lynda Steadman) is recessive--a shy, nervous little thing with a tendency, in her younger days, to break out in psychosomatic rashes. Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) is excessive--a noisy, knowing, angry woman with a tendency, untempered by the passing years, to break out in devastating tirades at anyone who disappoints her.

Roommates in college, they are getting together for a weekend in London after a six-year hiatus in their relationship. Since this takes place under the auspices of writer-director Mike Leigh, you know going in that you are volunteering for a movie in which cramped spaces will be crammed with intensely realistic acting. And that the past, which his characters are almost never able to put safely behind them, will keep nipping, biting, chomping at his Career Girls.

Compared with that past, indeed, the girls' careers are nothing much, just jobs that pay them enough to replace their former undergraduate scruffiness with low-budget chic. Otherwise, their work makes them vaguely restless in ways that are scarcely worth discussing. This is not to say that frequent flashbacks to the bad old days--when the pair lived, squabbling and self-obsessed, in a rundown flat above a Chinese takeout restaurant--are finally any more conclusive. Or that the girls' chance encounters with figures out of that past--a slick, careless lover they once shared; a weird, enormous former roommate now lost to schizophrenia (and played with great and tender ferocity by Mark Benton)--are particularly illuminating.

Like virtually all Leigh's characters, Annie and Hannah are trapped in the hopelessness of modern life. Or should we make that modern English life? Educated to the point of glibness, but not to the point of wisdom, they know just enough to recognize the constraints of class, gender and material longing, but not enough to break through them, to achieve the freedom of mind and spirit that modernity keeps promising but never quite delivers. This leaves them at once ranting and wistful, delivering those arias of discontent--often funny, sometimes touching, always brutally frank--that are the hallmark of the director's famously improvisational style.

Though our heroines' initial wariness gives way to a tentative reawakening of a friendship less abrasive, possibly more trusting, than it once was, nothing much happens, dramatically speaking, in Career Girls. It is less scarring than Leigh's Naked, less poignant than Secrets & Lies. But still it offers a behavioral truthfulness and a passionate engagement with the despairs of dailiness that put most movies to shame.

--By Richard Schickel