JAT Entertainment

H

Lynda Steadman plays Annie, all grown up.

Katrin Cartlidge: Hannah as a young professional in Career Girls.

ments, "Looks like you've done the tango ally grant interviews [with Jewish publi- Secrets and Lies enjoyed is only more trib-
cations]. I'm cautious about it all; it's a pri- ute to what an "anarchic, artistic person"
with a cheese grater."
Hannah is played by Katrin Cartlidge vate aspect of my life. The audience can achieve. In his film Life is Sweet, he
— of Breaking the Waves and Leigh's shouldn't be primarily concerned with my portrays a family which is funny, painful,
simple, sad — it is real, it is life.
Naked. Cartlidge herself is the daughter religion."
"All my films tap into ongoing feelings,
Mike Leigh has spent a lifetime stub-
of a German-Jewish refugee who fled
Berlin as a girl in 1938, and whose father bornly laboring against forces against him preoccupations: They look at secrets about
was literally left on the steps of an or- — the commercial norm. Understandably, relationships from the present and past,
he has had a difficult time of finding fi- things that happened in childhood, careers,
phanage.
Perhaps her childhood impacted a need nancial backing for films which have 110 Where they're going, and that relationship
to the past and present, how we are and
to explore her characters' vulnerabilities; script — yet.
But the international success that what we are doing.
whatever the influence, she exudes in Han-
nah a manic, sometimes cruel bully
with a fierce wit and the always un-
derlying struggle to unleash her sen-
sitivity, which is softened in her later
meeting with Annie.
"She's brilliant," says Leigh of
Cartlidge, "very committed and cre-
ative, very talented and very funny."
Leigh's own family history in-
cludes a great-grandfather who was
editor of a Zionist newspaper before
World War I, and Leigh himself was
for a time involved in the Habonin
movement (a Zionist youth move-
ment). He recently visited Ukmerge,
Lithuania, his grandfather's home-
town, which his grandfather left at
the age of 16. Leigh also took his
1991 film Life is Sweet to the Israel
Film Festival.
"I grew up in a very strong Zion-
ist background," says Leigh. "But I
walked away from it when I was
about 17. And I became disen-
chanted by Israeli politics and treat-
ment toward Palestine.
"I'm a spiritual person; you know
that from my films. But I'm suspi-
cious of religion. I'm concerned with
roots, those past and present. It isn't
that I have no sense of Jewish roots,
that's a very different thing. But I
have no interest in the clutter of the
Jewish community.
"I'm a normal bohemian, anar-
chic, artistic person who is not bour-
geois," he continues. "I don't practice
[religion] at all, but Jewishness stays
in one's life.
"I've read all of Isaac Bashevis
Singer, Primo Levi. And I don't usu- Lynda Steadman and Katrin Cartlidge as college students Annie and Hannah.

–

"I return to the guises and modes of re-
lationships. I don't make the kinds of
movies where there is one single idea.
They're about how we live our lives." ❑

tZt Mike Leigh's Career Girls will screen
one weekend only at the DIA's Detroit
Film Theatre. 7 and 9:30 p.m. Friday;
4, 7 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday; 4 and 7
p.m. Sunday, Aug. 29-31. $5.50; $4/stu-
dents/members. 5200 Woodward, De-
troit. Call (313) 833-2323.