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Character and Plot: Meantime and Four days in July
- University of Illinois Press
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36 | Mike Leigh my readers to seek them out to discover the full breadth and depth of this director’s work. Character and Plot: Meantime and Four Days in July Meantime (1983) and Four Days in July (1985) are, more explicitly than many Mike Leigh films, “about” something. Meantime is “about” unemployment ; Four Days in July is “about” Northern Ireland. One might think that Secrets and Lies is “about” adoption, or that Vera Drake is “about” abortion. But adoption and abortion in the two later films are narrative discoveries rather than narrative premises. Unemployment and Northern Ireland, in the two earlier films, are not discoveries but inescapable atmospheric conditions about which everyone in each of these two films is thinking, and about which we are asked to think from the beginning—not least because the titles announce the central problems of the films. Meantime and Four Days can also be said to be about two other things. Meantime is about character, and Four Days is about plot. We have seen that pairing before, in reverse order, in The Five Minute Films; The Birth of the Goalie of the 2001 F.A. Cup Final is about plot, and Old Chums is about character. The schism between character and plot, at later points in Leigh’s career, operates not between films but within a film: in Vera Drake, where the heroine goes from being an individuated character in the first half to an element within a plot in the second half, and in Topsy-Turvy, whose two central characters personify the divide, as Sullivan cares about character (human emotion and probability, in his phrase) and Gilbert cares about plot (“the world of topsy-turvydom”). The central tension within Topsy-Turvy demonstrates one of the many ways in which that film, far from being “a Mike Leigh film” or “not a Mike Leigh film,” as has been contested, may very well be the Mike Leigh film: a centaur film, split into character and plot, where the side-by-side and the unbroken shot lead us back through the history of side-by-sides and unbroken shots. Indeed, Topsy-Turvy and Four Days in July, both of which present Leigh far removed from home territory—a Victorian period piece, and his only film set outside of England—share a number of features. They alone among Leigh’s films both begin and end with i-xii_1-196_O'Sul.indd 36 6/24/11 8:33 AM The Nature of Contrivance | 37 a long take. Furthermore, the first shot in each case depicts a grid of horizontal and vertical vectors, announcing the film’s subject as the stage management of a theater; in the case of Four Days a theater of war, and in the case of Topsy-Turvy a theater of play. And the final shot in each case is a tour de force that foregrounds women, or a woman, caught in an act of comparison, engaged in a complex and perhaps irresolvable side-by-side. To return to the pair at hand, let me clarify what “about” means, particularly in terms of character and plot. I mean that the subject matter of Meantime and Four Days involves not only the people and events of each film but also the ontological conditions, respectively, of character and plot. Plot is in some ways the crucial element of both Meantime and Four Days, since the characters’ difficulties in each case arise from either an absence or surfeit of plot; each film posits an extreme narrative situation—characters in search of a plot, characters overwhelmed by plot—in which the story of the film unfolds. Unlike, say, Jean-Luc Godard ’s Weekend (1967)—a film that moves dialectically between diegesis and theory—Meantime and Four Days stay within a realist framework of people and events. They are plainly “Mike Leigh films” in the patience of their pace and in the way that the characters sit around discussing their daily lives. The films are theoretical in the way that they consider how character and plot, as constructs, govern our lives; they are not about character revelation or plot turn. Indeed, a great many of the characters in Meantime remain distant from us as characters; we don’t get “inside” them, the way we might get inside characters in a Henry James novel. And there is hardly any more plot, in a conventional sense, in Four Days than there is Meantime; we don’t experience plot as the motor of...