Meantime (film)


Meantime is a 1983 British comedy-drama television film directed by Mike Leigh, produced by Central Television for Channel 4. It was shown in 1983 at the London Film Festival and on Channel 4 and at the 1984 Berlin International Film Festival. According to the critic Michael Coveney: "The sapping, debilitating and demeaning state of unemployment, the futile sense of waste, has not been more poignantly, or poetically, expressed in any other film of the period."

Plot

The film unfolds in brief episodes, detailing the travails of the working-class Pollock family, who live in a shabby flat in a tower block in London's East End. They are struggling to stay afloat during the recession under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's premiership. Only the nagging, put-upon mother Mavis is working; the bitter, feckless father Frank and the couple's two sons Colin, an extremely shy young man, and Mark, his outspoken, headstrong older brother, are on the dole. Their aimless, querulous existence is contrasted with Mavis's sister Barbara and her husband John, whose financial and social loftiness in suburban Chigwell serves as a comfortable facade for their lacklustre marriage.
The boys spend their time at home, on the street, at friends' flats, in the unemployment office, and at the local pub. Mark is continually scrounging for cash and cadging drinks from his friends, among them Coxy, a crude, impulsive skinhead. Colin has a crush on a sweet-natured girl named Hayley, but he can't bring himself to act upon it. Mark mocks his father, teases Colin by calling him "Kermit" and "Muppet," and makes insinuations about Barbara's troubled relationship with her husband. Barbara offers Colin a job helping her redecorate her home, but when Mark shows up, Colin withdraws, refuses to do any work, and finally leaves. When he returns home, he's had his head shaved. There is no resolution to the film, simply a succession of days that present commonplace problems, amusements, conversations, and arguments.

Cast