Review of Meantime

'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 does, by removing all those things - hope, work, dreams etc. - that mark humanity and individuality. As bitterly angry and funny as 'Naked'.