Who's Who (1979, Mike Leigh) (Patreon)

47/100

High Hopes was the first of Leigh's films I saw and loved (initially, that is; got downgraded to "quite like" decades later), and this group portrait of a brokerage firm's employees and their inner circle, across the class spectrum, plays like a very rough early draft. With a crucial distinction, however: Where High Hopes unmistakably favors its working-class socialists, portraying them as flawed but human (in stark contrast to the ultra-snooty caricatures that are Lætitia and Rupert Boothe-Brain), Who's Who lays out its titular social hierarchy thusly: Makes no difference, they're all dolts. Interesting to see Phil Davis, who's at once crunchy and snappish as Hopes' heavily bearded Cyril, on the opposite side here, playing a young, smooth-jawed, playfully sardonic suit; he's but one face in a sprawling ensemble, though, and Leigh's relentless mockery, absent even the most skeletal narrative (there's a dinner party and a feline transaction / photo session; that's pretty much it), quickly grows tiresome. Every character, maybe excepting the kitty photographer (whose surname being Shakespeare inspires several not-quite-jokes), seems beneath contempt—not ours, mind you, but the movie's. Even in his weakest projects, Leigh always finds gifted actors who burrow into some sort of pathology, and there are pockets of amusement scattered throughout a thankfully brief running time; I particularly liked the jolt of energy that Catherine Hall provides as Samantha, who doesn't give a flying fuck about anything except keeping her own insouciance at full throttle. But the film is too sour to be actively funny and too shallow to be terribly interesting. Also, I do not wish to hear the word "yeah" pronounced as "yaw" ever again.