2 - Fictitious Selves: Bleak Moments

Summary

The things which engage my interest are all those areas of life in which people are trapped. Trapped by mores, habit, and received behavior patterns. … In Paris, they made a lot of comparisons between Family Life and Bleak Moments because of the psychiatric side of both films. It's a red herring. … [The mentally retarded problem] is a device by which to discuss people who are trapped. You could say that Hilda is the least trapped of all those five central characters.

–Mike Leigh

Social science understandings have triumphed in so many fields that it should not be surprising that film criticism has also been affected. Films are treated as being more or less direct emanations of the social and ideological understandings of the culture that produced them, and their content is translated into a set of sociological generalizations about race, class, power, and gender. Such an approach may work with the products of the Hollywood assembly line, but it simply doesn't suffice for Leigh's work. In fact, one of the things that stands in the way of the appreciation of Leigh's films is the way they frustrate ideological interpretation. They don't offer the kind of portable truths many critics want.

The problem is larger than the fact that Leigh's depictions do not conform to liberal pieties about the working class; his films offer ways of understanding that are fundamentally opposed to those of sociology.