Mike Leigh High Hopes 1988

 

I had watched High Hopes before Secrets and Lies but still enjoyed them both the same.

There were lots of similar themes between them, the film again focuses on the intertwining of a family’s stories. The film starts with exploring the lives of Cyril and Shirley who live in a rough flat in London, they help a stranger and give him a bed for the night. Cyril and Shirley present the typical ‘leftist’ people of the Thatcher years, they go and visit the grave of Karl Marx and despise the current system. Cyril works a low minimum wage job as a delivery man, and his mother who is turning 70 Mrs. Bender lives now in a gentrified area where everyone, but her house has been done up and sold for 1,000’s. Mrs. Bender signifies the small number of people now who are native to London, who have lived on the same street since their parents and have survived the war.

She is portrayed to be extremely lonely and is pretty much mute all the time when her son comes to visit her, her daughter Valerie is married to a fat car sales man who is vulgar and horrible, she is vain and selfish and see’s her mother as a burden. Later in the film it is portrayed that Mrs. Bender may be suffering from dementia as she forgets her purse and then later mistakes her son for her dead husband. But when Cyril and Shirley take her into their home, she perks up, eats a full meat and potato pie and falls asleep for the first time in years.

Mike Leigh similarly as in Secrets and Lies portrays that with the regeneration of places especially in London it is easy to forget and overlook the importance of the history there, taking form in Mrs. Bender all she needed was looking after and that is possible regardless of any class.