Maybe, it’s not as sexy sounding as “Robin Hood” (which we basically just dismissed as forgettable) or Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” nevertheless one of our most anticipated 2010 pictures debuting at the Cannes Film Festival is Mike Leigh’s new humanist drama, “Another Year.”
Surrounded in mystery for the better part of half a year, the synopsis just recently came out, plus a whole ton of photos. The film stars Jim Broadbent (Leigh’s “Topsy-Turvy”) Imelda Staunton (Leigh’s “Vera Drake”), Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Peter Wright and Oliver Maltman, and while the short version is vague it sounds like it’s about… life and it’s broken in up into the chapters of a seasonal year. The exact synopsis is this:
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Family and friendship. Love and warmth. Joy and sadness. Hope and despair. Companionship. Loneliness. A birth. A death. Time passes…
Of course a more in-depth version with much of the details lies at the Cannes website.
Leigh’s methodology is kind of amazing and kind of insane. We just met an actress who worked with Leigh on “Vera Drake” for six months in his legendary deep-diving improvisation sessions and her screen time amounted to about one minute. But, it apparently doesn’t matter to Leigh, it’s all about learning who these characters are by living and breathing them night and day for several months. These clips don’t reveal too much, but they give you a flavor of what to expect. We’re sure they’re going to seem dull to some readers, but Leigh generally never fails to illuminate some corner of the human condition and we’re surely glad there’s some studios that care about films like these that are not in 3D and not aimed at the groin in your brain. Now if only this picture will be as good as Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan were in “Happy Go Lucky.”
“Another Year” is a Focus Features picture and we imagine it’ll arrive sometime in the fall.