Review of Another Year (2010) by Shiira — 23 Feb 2011

Mary(Leslie Manville) is a "glass half-full kind of girl" living in a glass half-empty world, a diegetic world where problems don't magically resolve themselves before the credits start rolling, as if on cue.

In a different film, the coquettish act that the middle-aged woman puts on for Joe(Oliver Maltman), the much-younger son of Gerri(Ruth Sheen), Mary's "friend", wouldn't be so cringe-inducing.

At a party, Mary asks the thirty-year-old man out for drinks, and the moviegoer feels so embarrassed on her behalf, because this lush, in spite of the make-up and youthful-looking wardrobe, isn't fooling anybody with her grab for relative youth.

Fishing for a compliment, Mary asks Joe to guess her age, and not wanting to encourage any further advances from the old lady, the unmarried man jokingly guesses "sixty...seventy," before falling silent, because a lie(to say that she could pass for her late-thirties or early-forties) would be even more cruel than the truth.

She's not aging well; that's the sad truth, but still the woman insists on wearing a flower in her hair, clinging on to the belief that she possesses a vestige of her former sexual allure. And you know it once existed, this sexual allure, just by the way she carries herself.

Back in the day, Mary must have been hot, which would account for Tom's patience with this cougar in heat. Somewhere in his adult self lies the who once fancied his mother's sexy friend from work, and Mary seems to know what sort of effect she had on men, young and old alike, in her prime, as she fulfills a possible boyhood fantasy of Tom's when she feigns to enter his treehouse.

Quite tellingly, late in "Another Year", Tom remembers that Mary once worked as a **** waitress in Corfu, an island in Greece, which to a boy of ten, must have been exceedingly exotic. At another time, Mary had a job in New York.

It's this happier time, years that overlapped with Gerri's knowing of her as the medical group's secretary, which is key to understanding "Another Year", a miserablist film with no exit. Happily married to Tom(Jim Broadbent), thriving professionally as a psychotherapist, the moviegoer has to consider their younger incarnations to make sense of this unlikely association.

Twenty years earlier, Mary must have been a lot of fun to be around, a kooky, free-spirit singleton that a married woman with son in-tow might have secretly envied. When Mary makes reference to an old flame, a married man, in, what we gather, another of her frequent drunken spiels, it's Tom, not Gerri, who sides with her.

While the husband calls this ex-lover "a duplicitous s*it", the wife ungenerously reminds Mary, at her lowest point, that "it takes two to tango," and that "we all have to make choices," suggestive of an older dynamic to their friendship where this alcoholic old maid was the leader and Gerri, the follower, and now, after all these years, the happily married woman still relishes the moment where the fun-loving office gal lost her agency over the straight-laced doctor.

Ever since the fallout from this problematic love affair, Mary has been living vicariously through her "friend from work"(the qualifier belongs to Gerri, whereas they were once simply friends), who as it turns out, is the lucky one.

In an earlier scene, Gerri refers to her extra girth as her "middle-aged spread", in front of Mary, whose looks no longer carries any currency. The word "perfect", which Tom uses to describe his wife, is what previously had been applicable to Mary, back in the day.

Gerri is nice to her, because she can afford it. Mary is such an obvious trainwreck, the mother never worries about Joe being tempted by her friend from work's feminine wiles. In another diegetic world, Gerri would have to worry, because in most films, doesn't the luck of the lonely and downtrodden change at some point? They always find love, right? If not Joe, then surely it's going to be Ken(Peter Wight), who will rescue Mary from certain spinsterhood, and live happily ever after.

But alas, Tom's longtime friend is morbidly obese and greying at the top, and in Mary's eyes, no knight in shining armor. All the good older men, as suggested in a brief scene at the pub, are interested in women half their age.

Mary never learned the valuable lesson that "beauty is only skin deep". She's like the character in the Nanci Griffith song "Drive-in Movies and Dashboard Lights", who is "heavy on thigh and light on integrity," who never learns that "when beauty's all you offer, too soon the world discovers that your beauty's gone.