Career Girls

REVIEW
In this wry, nicely crafted character study, Cartlidge and Steadman costar as Hannah and Annie, respectively, a pair of college roommates who meet up in London years later for a personal reunion. Through a series of flashbacks, Leigh depicts the wild days of their raucous, punked out youth living in a seedy London flat, pursuing their studies and loves, and consulting Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" as an oracle. The young Hannah is frenetic and high-strung, and carries on with an assertive air of good-humored self-confidence, while Annie is a study in timidity, her face ravaged by dermatitis and her speech short and clipped -- a strange pair, but they form a deep bond nonetheless. A decade later, both have matured, yet they awkwardly circle around each other searching for that nexus that brought them together in the first place. Leigh is a master of portraying the complex subtleties of the human condition as he delves into his protagonists' fragile psyches.