Hard Labour looks suspiciously like slice-of-life, but not far into this drama of an older working class woman we know that Leigh's hyper realism is light-years away from British kitchen-sink. Here is a film in which people seem to be virtually drowning in real-life atmosphere. Mrs. Thornley is a constant wife constantly dusting, polishing, rubbing, frying, and, when alone, sighing. When she's not doing it for her own family, she's doing it for a living. People want to like Mrs. Thornley anyway, they like to sit around and watch her work but Liz Smith portrays a woman so consumed by guilt, there is not much left to like. Leigh refracts her degradation through others Mr. Thornley's pub bombast, his hairy back as she massages it; daughter Ann's encounter with an abortionistand the film offers an intimate thumbnail sketch of labor relations that says a great deal indeed. But it all comes back to Mrs. Thornley and her moment of truth in a confessional, spoken to a bored and broken priest This is quintessential Leigh: a small, earth shattering revelation, after which nothing changes.

Director in Person Nats in May, one of Leigh's most popular films, is a hilarious portsit of the seventies counterculture, whose life style codes could both bolster and bludgeon the hapless subscriber. Keith and Candice-Marie, two city dwellers on a back-to-nature trek in Dorset, spend much of their time chewing their nuts 72 times, shunning "the killer whites" (flour, sugar...), and composing politically correct folk ballads. They set up camp, only to find that their nearest neighbor is blissfully unaware of the Country Code. He becomes something of a mystery for that and eventually, a catalyst for the crack up. Despite pretense to the contrary, Keith is one of your less relaxed souls in God's world; the world has failed him, and Roger Sloman builds his panicked intensity layer by closely observed layer. (Still, he may be Leigh's most sympathetic portrayal of a social worker, a chronically suspicious species in the films.) Alison Steadman, as Candice-Marie, is more than the perfect foil for Keith's pedantry as her bright-eyed enthusiasm subtly dims, like a guitar just slightly out of tune.

Leigh's most overlooked filmand, according to the director, "my most radical"this is the tale of a young funeral parlor assistant named Trevor. Trevor walks on his tip-toes,as if he were afraid of wakmg the dead, nervously laughs away all affection for the living but tenderly tends to the departed. In his spare time, Trevor makes three a crowd with his friend Ronnie and Ronnie's girlfriend Sandra (who looks wondrously like Betty Boop), until Sandra takes the situation in hand by introducing Trevor to Linda. A few nondates, a few uncomfortable flirtatious spats, and we witness Trevor's right of passage into the world of the living: his first non kiss, one of the most awkwardly protracted moments in cinema. There's always a breakdown in a Mike Leigh film and we can hardly wait for Trevor to suffer his. His moment of self knowledge is just that (you have to listen closely to catch it) but the film hinges on it. This is genuine black comedy, and Leigh insures that we keep our distance from the subject matter in clever ways (dialogue slips almost imperceptibly from cremation to discodancing). But Ronnie & Sandra & Trevor & Linda are a younger, poorer version of the lot in Abigail's Party; already, they have no direction in life, and this is precisely the direction in which they will continue.

Based on Leigh's successful stage play, this parlor piece is a showcase for Alison Steadman's brilliant comedic talents. Steadman creates characters out of body language, accent and nasal tone. Here, as Beverly, she holds her head erect as if heeding strains from The Kng and 1, orchestrates a cocktail party for five like an impressario, and modulates

Among young scions of the upper class cutting their teeth as.agents at a brokerage firm, Nigel and Giles share a flat, as well. Nigel, much like Beverly in Abxgail's Party, becomes consumed with plans for a dinner party, but can't seem to convey the importance of the occasion to Giles, who is perpetually distracted and uncomfortable. In the event, however, their guests rise to the occasion leaving Nigel even more bereft than when he started. Meanwhile, Alan, a scion of the middle class employed at the same firm, is a veritable Mr. Memory when it comes to the aristocracy: he's made a detailed study of the lineage, likes and loves of the rich and famous. With his wife April and their dozen cats, Alan has made a lifework out of anomie. Who's Who, among other things, sends up British television as Americans know and love it: these upper-class twits who are old before their time hold litde glamor, while Alan's fixation with his betters registers beyond the pale. Leigh always makes us laugh, but he's not happy until he makes us squlrm.

Dick and Mandy (Philip Davis and Lesley Manville) are young marrieds settling into their first row- house while their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Butcher,are old hands at the marriage game. Dick and Mandy want a baby but instead get Mandy's ubiquitous older sistet Glotia, whose normality has reached critical mass and who is now looking for a safe place to explode into babbling idiocy. Grown-Ups is a surprisingly funny film of postures, squints and tics which builds to a svaging climax in the upstaits hallway, just outside the loo. It has the look of nauseano one fails to notice that Dick and Mandy's house "could use a clean"but it is a kind film, a loving film, in only the way that Mike Leigh can be: without patronizing, he anguishes with his creations;while he allows us to laugh at them, he's somehow on their side. A scene in which Dick, Mandy and Gloria, now that they are "grown up," recall their dismal years in high school is a classic of comi- tragedy. "The general tendency in my films is to say, by implication, that life could be better Leigh understated recently in our interview. Grown-Ups is about finding that out. One of his best films, not to be missed.

The off-duty lives of three postmen who live in the same suburban development are more intert wined than they care to know: Stan, who works nights, by day visits the wives of the others. Home Sweet Home provides one of Leigh's most scathing portraits of the way our institutions &il usfrom marriage, which this film is a great argument against, to the social service agencies, to the very notion of home itself. There's a lot of humor but little joy in the way June, wife of Harold Fish (she calls him by both names) steps out on her husband when she's not lost in romantic novels: no one can understand the suffering of a woman such as herself, Harold is told repeatedly, and we have to believe her. Harold himself is periodically reduced to autistically rendering rock- and-roll songs soto vore to comfort himself against the onslaught that is his wife/ we mean life. But the serious center of the film is Stan (played by Eric Richard): divorced, his child in an orphanage, he is the object of caring social workers who haven't a clue to the fact that, for a man like himself, home does not exist any more than it does for Colin in Meantime. Something has snapped; something is no more. If you can believe that Leigh has created a very funny comedy out of this, then you're ready for Home Sweet Home.

Meantime is the portrait of a London family who share a cramped East End apartment and little else. Our hero is Colin (Tim Roth), a simplewitted boy who has gone into his father's line of workthe dole linewhile his mother spends her days playing bingo and his cynical older brother, Mark, manages to beat him at every tutn in an already miserable life. We have to laugh at Colin, but we feel guilty and helpless while we're doing it. Gary Oldman is wonderfully Oldman- esque as the street punk, Coxy, whose edgy antics push the film into a theater of the absurd. Even more than in High Hopes,in Meantime we see the meanness of Thatcherism: Colin isn't just simple he's been simplified. The post-apocalypse is everpresent in this housing project with its large spaces where no one walks and papers blow in the wind and no one does anything. "What're you doing Tuesday?" is a rhetorical question. (A lecture, delivered by the block manager cum G-man, on "The Anthill" rivals the diatribe by the social worker at the end of Home Sweet Home for irrelevancy. Only Colin, in his blessed density, has a fitting response: "We got ants?") Still, the breakdown in Meantime comes in a surprising corner. Colin and Co. have nothing to break.

Here we meet Clive of the never ending knock-knock jokes; his new azvogr, Joy the chemists' shopgirl who prescribes from personal experience; and Joy's constant hairdresser, Betty, who itches in impossible places. Betty, another in a series of Alison Steadman character studies, is the incarnation of confused caring; she takes it back as soon as she gives it. ("I like the red, but then again, it's not my hair"). Her daughtet, Charlene, is a youthful incarnation of age-old despair, who seems as surptised as we are to find herself in this short wacky film. But like Clive says, "wouldn't

One of the best films to emerge from Britain in the eighties, Leigh's second theatrical feature in seventeen years widened his international audience, won critical acclaim. The setting is London in the age of greed: mid-to-late Maggie. Cyril and Shirley rent a small flat, with a meager income, a prickly cactus named Thatcher, and a warm love bolstered by their disdain for materialism. Cyril and Shirley are trying to decide whether to bring a child into this imperfect world. What doesn't help is: Cyril's mother edging into senility as gentrification edges her out of  her flat; her two comically callous Yuppie neighbors and Cyril's sister Valerie, hell bent for bad taste. Leigh's hopes are about as high as Dickens. A true reflexation on life in England.

A comedic chronicler of the everyday, with its bizarre and tragic rituals thrown into relief  His subject is, the British lower middle class or working class family for whom daily life holds only the promise of more daily life, with its kernel of reassurance toward off total despair. The tyranny of tea time, the torment of chops and sprouts, day in and day out, the allure of the pub and the glow to the telily, the gray sameness of weather end work the exquisite agony to being British, being grown-up, and finally, of simply being this  the work of Mike Leigh.

To Mike Leigh, a skinhead is a person, an individual with a story to tell with nuance and emotional impact. And just as importantly, that story, that sequence of events leading to the decision to break with society's norms, is more than simply a tale of psychological evolution. It is also a sociological treatise: an expose of the misery of the working (or non-working) class in Thatcherite Britain, a distressing look at a disaster of a family, and an examination of  the genesis of despair.

Sounds bleak, doesn't its Well, it is. A Mike Leigh film is not for those looking for light-hearted escapism, happy endings, or easy answers. Despite such fetching, seemingly romantic names as High Hopes, Life is Sweet, Nuts in May, and Home Sweet Home, a Leigh film tends to be equal parts satire and hopeless frustration. His characters do not triumph over obstacles, they merely endure them; the circumstances of their lives do not improve, or worsen, but just continue on and on; the film does not conclude it stops.

LEIGH focuses on ordinary people instead of the glamorous and beautiful, but no one is safe from his searing insights . A vegetarian couple who go to the countryside to sing folk songs and commune with nature comes off as psychotically dangerous (Nuts in May). The middle-class man who apes upper-class mannerisms is even more ludicrous than the upper class snob (Who's Who, 1978). The workers are as much a target for derision as the rulers.

The compelling realness of Leigh's films may stem from his working style. He prefers to say that he ``Devises his movies, rather than directs." He works with his actors to create characters in an improvised setting. The characters and improvisations that Leigh deems workable are then sculpted into an organized framework. Only then does filming begin. Since the actors often draw their inspiration for characters from actual friends or acquaintances and then base their improvisations on what feels most appropriate to that character, making the result convincing.

Leigh's films transpose the Theater of the Absurd, with the precise quality of its dialogue, to the cinema of hyper-realism. The films also are rooted in experimental theater, in that they are the result of a stringent collective process. Leigh and his stock company of actors, including Alison Steadman, his wife, working together invent not only dialogue but a whole history for each character, each relationship. Leigh then hones those characters, that dialogue into a script. You won't see acting like the anywhere else; Indeed an actor in one film barely resembles him or herself in the next. Critic Micheal Sragow called is Laigh's comedy original, unexpected existential slap- stick

Nuts in May, one of the earliest of Leigh's 15 television films, is a good example. At first glance, the story of the environmentally conscious social worker and his wife who run into all kinds of unanticipated problems in rural England might seem fertile ground for a light-hearted slapstick romp. And sure enough, their loopy folk-song duets, excruciating poetry, and utter alienation from what it really means to live in the country draws chuckles.

The film's evolving pchological portrait of Keith is chilling. His iron-hand domination of his relationship with his wife, Candice-Marie  is a disturbing display of inequality that undermines what ever merit he might gain from being a vegetarian and social worker. climax of the film, when Keith driven into violence by what he considers the unbardable liberties taken by a fellow camper. One is tempted to recommend Nuts in May be required living in Berkeley, where the spirit Keith is alive and well: holier-then thou, intolerant, and humorless.

Who's Who. It is a snapshot of a few days in the lives of several people and families who are only tenuously connected to each other. Plot is not the point for in this film: People are. Nigel and Giles, two roommates who have a dinner party that reveals conclusively that money does not indeed buy happiness, are the representatives of the ruling class. Alan, who obsessively corresponds with the rich and famous (or at least their press secretaries) and whose wife raises chinchillas, is the middle-class man who wants nothing more than to hobnob in the elevator with those who will be forever at least three flights above him. Definitely a funny film, but at the same time desperately serious; class relations, in England, are no joke.

Meantime, is no comedy. It is tragedy, pure and simple, and while it is difficult to sit through, depressing, and ugly, it is also one of the best, and most sympathetic, of all Leigh's films. Talk about a dysfunctional family! Mom is foul-tempered, abusive, and fed up with the rest of the family. Dad and the two boys are unemployed and on the dole. Mark, the older brother, lives in a fantasy world of espionage and conspiracy. Colin, the younger, is unable to cope with anything. Whether he's simple-minded, schizophrenic, or just hiding from the world is unclear.

Desperation is written on every face in this film set in launderettes, pubs, pool halls, and garbage- strewn alleyways. It is 1983 in Britain, and skinheads are snarling at blacks, punk music reigns, and there is no way out. When the teenage boys are asked the question, ``What have you been doing?" and they answer, ``Nothing," they mean it.

There is a do-gooder aunt who fails miserably and an apartment superintendent whose progressive attitude is irrelevant. They make no difference. Who wouldn't want to hide from this world? Who wouldn't want to reject it utterly? Who wouldn't become a skinhead?