Meantime · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A young man climbs inside an empty oil drum on a concrete estate and starts banging it around from the inside — going nowhere, making a racket for the sake of a racket. That's Coxy, Gary Oldman before anyone knew the name, and the image holds most of what Meantime knows. There is energy here. There is nowhere for it to go. Mike Leigh keeps the camera back and lets the noise run on past the point a normal film would cut away, and in that extra, useless duration the whole picture declares itself.

It helps to borrow a distinction from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who spent two books sorting cinema into two big families. In the first — he calls it the movement-image — a person sees a situation, and acts on it, and the action changes things; the cutting carries you along the chain of cause and effect toward a result. Most films you have ever watched work this way. Meantime doesn't. The Pollocks see their situation perfectly well — no work, no money, no exit under the first Thatcher government — and they cannot act on it. The drum bangs and the estate stays exactly where it is. Deleuze has a name for this stalled engine: the crisis of the action-image, the moment characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Once you notice the circuit is cut, the film's apparent shapelessness stops being a flaw and becomes the subject. There is no goal-driven hero, no suspense, no resolving climax, because the world Leigh is filming has confiscated all three.

What fills the space instead is time itself. Leigh and his editor Lesley Walker let scenes idle — a dole queue, a family meal eaten facing away from one another, a visit between sisters — holding the shot until awkwardness, boredom and silence become the actual content. Deleuze calls these stretches temps mort, dead time: passages where nothing advances the action and the everyday is simply held. And because nobody can do anything, the characters are reduced to looking and listening. That is what Deleuze means by a pure optical and sound situation — an opsign. Watch Colin, Tim Roth in his first screen role, slack-jawed and frightened, retreating inward: he is no longer an agent but a voyant, a seer, someone who registers the world without being able to move it. The camera, on Roger Pratt's long lenses, watches him watching, boxed in by doorways and the geometry of small rooms. We are put in his position. We can only look too.

This is why the film's real medium is the body. Deleuze, late in his cinema books, describes a cinema of the body, where an everyday posture carries the weight of a whole social condition — what he calls the gest, an attitude that exposes a relation rather than narrating an event. Meantime is almost entirely gests. Coxy in the drum. Frank slumped and beaten. The much-cited image of Colin's shaved head — not a plot point, but a body's mute attempt to mean something, to be a skinhead, to be anyone. These are eruptions of frustrated energy staged precisely as postures, because posture is the only language the unemployed body has left. Built through Leigh's long improvisatory rehearsal, every actor carries an unseen biography into the frame, so the bodies feel lived-in rather than written. The drama is Chekhovian: the significance sits in subtext, in what cannot be said, in the way an economic force lands as private misery.

Leigh did not invent this gaze; he refined an inheritance. The patient camera observing people trudge through dead economic time descends straight from Italian neorealism — from Bicycle Thieves, where, as André Bazin argued, the point was to stop dramatizing reality and start respecting its duration. The British line runs through the kitchen-sink New Wave (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), through Loach and Garnett's 16mm Cathy Come Home, through the unsentimental held takes of Kes, and through Leigh's own Abigail's Party, where the comedy of embarrassment was first staged in real time inside one claustrophobic room. Meantime gathers all of it onto the council estate and grants it to a cast of unknowns — Roth, Oldman, Phil Daniels — who would carry the method outward for thirty years.

There is a politics in the stillness. Deleuze said modern political cinema turns on the sense that "the people are missing" — that the dispossessed have no collective body able to act for them. Meantime is exactly that absence given a flat and a kettle. Its quiet final gesture, Mark's gruff protectiveness toward his brother, offers human tenderness without once pretending the larger conditions have shifted.

What the film did to film was small and permanent: it proved that television-scale economics and a square 16mm frame could hold a whole social order in the time it takes a man to grow bored in a kitchen. Watch it again for the dead time you were trained to find dull. That boredom is the argument.