katrin cartlidge

Her Brilliant Career: Honoring Katrin Cartlidge (1961-2002)

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By Julian Upton | May, 2014

When Brookside started in November 1982, it instantly revolutionised the British TV soap opera. Cheaply videotaped with outside broadcast equipment in and around real, purposely built houses in a faceless modern suburb of Liverpool, it had the unglamorous hue of a local news report, an ugly and slightly jarring visual quality that it shared with contemporary TV dramas such as Boys from the Blackstuff and Auf Widersehen, Pet. And Brookside showed societal ugliness in a way no soap opera had done before. Bad language, unemployment, urban disillusionment, militant politics and domestic violence — all had controversially hijacked the storylines within weeks of its beginning. What made all this watchable, indeed endearing, was a constant thread of humour and the quality of the writing and acting.

The cast of Brookside‘s early years is a roll call of talented actors, many of whom went on to find genuine success in the UK, albeit on the small screen: Sue Johnston, Ricky Tomlinson, Amanda Burton, John McArdle, Alexandra Pigg. And unique amongst this initial line-up was Katrin Cartlidge.

Even in the company of other good actors, there was something more intense and unflinching about Katrin Cartlidge. Playing Lucy Collins, the troubled daughter of the neighbourhood’s petit bourgeois family, she constantly bristled with an insolent ennui and a mild subversiveness. Somewhat portentously, she drifted through storylines that dealt with promiscuity, disillusionment, and petty theft with the cool detachment of a character in an arthouse film. Thin-lipped, unsmiling, and angular-featured, Cartlidge as Lucy Collins was never conventionally pretty, but she was gracious, controlled, and deep, and underneath her cool contempt boiled a defiant sexuality. These were the very qualities that the actress was later to hone for uncompromising works of the cinema.

In retrospect, given the strength of her future choices and performances, Cartlidge seems to have stayed with Brookside rather longer than was necessary. By the time of her departure in 1988, the soap was already betraying elements of the outrageous farce it later became. Murders, sieges, kidnappings, confrontational lesbianism — all went on to afflict this supposedly unremarkable cul-de-sac. It was quite clear, as the eighties closed, that as far as Brookside‘s producers were concerned, bums on seats were much more important than social comment.

This regrettable transition may have spurred Cartlidge onto new things, but initially she seemed a little directionless. She had a small role in Eat the Rich (1987) and, on television, Funseekers (1988) but these seemed like odd choices for someone so intense and intelligent. It took a few more years before it was clear that Cartlidge — cool, perceptive, self-aware — had her eye on the bigger picture.

While the best of her Brookside contemporaries were launching themselves into lucrative contracts in higher-profile television dramas, Katrin held back, got more stage experience and did her research. When she next made a splash on the screen, in 1993, it was with a small but haunting performance in Mike Leigh’s Naked. Cartlidge’s intensity was ideally suited to the desolate brutality of Naked. As Sophie, the druggie flatmate, she brings the right level of emotional distance her part, a darkly moulded background eccentric typical of Leigh’s serio-comic work. But the aftermath of her sexual brutalisation is played with a primal force that is unflinching, and betrays a powerful investment in the character.

Naked achieved much domestic and international acclaim, and the exposure it afforded Katrin could have propelled her to leading roles in more mainstream British film and television, perhaps even to the U.S. But the actress instead took the path that came to define her. Eschewing the “easier projects,” she instead chose to work next with Macedonian director Milcho Manchesvki in Before the Rain (1994). In one of three stories that sets the emotionally draining metropolis of London against the increasing volatility of rural Macedonia, Cartlidge plays a complicated, seemingly unsympathetic character. Although not fully successful, Before the Rain provides an early confirmation of her willingness to risk alienating the casual viewer. This was certainly not the characteristic of a star in the making, but key to her development as an actress.

When, in 1996, she appeared as Emily Watson’s sister-in-law in Lars von Trier‘s Breaking the Waves, it seemed that Katrin’s talent for identifying provocative, edgy, progressive projects was becoming more sophisticated. Although, arguably, Lars von Trier later became something of a Dogme prankster, Breaking the Waves is an emotionally grating and visually striking piece of work, laced with jet-black comedy and playful subversion. And, dominated as the film is by outsiders, extremists, and fantasists, Cartlidge, as Watson’s protective, buttoned-up sister-in-law, brings a necessary, if dourly humourless, touchstone of practical realism. She later claimed that working with von Trier had transformed her way of thinking as an actor.

Cartlidge then reunited with Mike Leigh to co-carry his Career Girls (1997), but that film and her performance suffers from a directorial lapse in character development. This is a pity, because the contemporary scenes in Career Girls showed a new side to Cartlidge, one that was adept at one-liners and serio-comedy. Sadly, the flashback scenes — where the actress plays her character in her younger days, all nervous tics and immature bravado — are excessive and overindulgent, and fall wide of the mark. (Although the jury of the 1997 Evening Standard Awards clearly thought otherwise, and voted her Best Film Actress of the Year.)

The following year, however, Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan (1998) afforded Cartlidge the opportunity to give the ultimate “arthouse” performance. Detached, damaged, and degraded, she pushed herself to new extremes here, as the emotionally stunted prostitute paying for her sick mother’s care by whoring herself unsmilingly around New York.

Cartlidge may have been too old now for the Samantha Morton/Kate Winslet roles that might have started to come her way, but she was already carving her niche in world cinema. As the nineties closed, she was journeying around the world, picking and choosing to work with directors who, in her own words, “I feel will produce something original, revealing and provoking.” Significantly, she was also being called upon, increasingly, to sit on judging panels at international film festivals. She had, somewhat uniquely for an ex-soap supporting actor, ascended to a level of artistic fulfillment that is usually reserved for the lionesses of European cinema.

As the new millennium began, Cartlidge was in a position to fluctuate between small parts in more commercial pictures (Dark Annie Chapman in From Hell, 2001 ) and central roles in provocative international films. Her last major impact was as the mercenary TV correspondent in Danis Tanovic’s extremely black Bosnian war comedy No Man’s Land (2001), a film that went on to beat the popular favourite Amelie to the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

But Cartlidge’s career was then cut short by a tragedy that was as shocking and as unexpected as anything she had been involved with onscreen. In early September 2002, she began complaining of flu symptoms, which became so pronounced that her partner later took her to hospital, near her home in North London. There she was diagnosed with pneumonia, and very soon septicaemia (blood poisoning) set in. She fell into a critical condition and died on 7th September. She was forty-one.

A few years before, Cartlidge had said “I actually like getting older. I hated my twenties; I couldn’t wait to be thirty. I’m really looking forward to turning forty, if I get there.” Although it is with a tragic irony that we now read that, it also goes some way to explaining the slow-burning impact of her career and her growing power as an actress. There were many more films to come; some would have been broader in appeal, but all would doubtless have been interesting, if only for the very reason that Cartlidge had chosen to be in them. One thing was pretty certain, she was never likely to turn up in the latest Austin Powers movie, however well known she might have become.

It is highly likely that, in her forties, Katrin would have chosen roles that would have consolidated her importance in international cinema. She may have become comparable to the great Isabelle Huppert — she certainly had the same passion, commitment, and cinematic courageousness. Her loss has been keenly felt by a legion of serious film-makers and fans.

Selected Filmography

1985: Sacred Hearts (UK)
1987: Eat the Rich (UK)
1993: Naked (UK)
1994: Look Me in the Eye (UK)
1994: Before the Rain (Macedonia)
1996: Breaking the Waves (Denmark/Sweden/France/Netherlands/Norway}
1997: Career Girls (UK)
1997: Saint-Ex (UK)
1998: Claire Dolan (France/US)
1998: The Lost Son (GB/France)
1998: The Cherry Orchard (Greece/Cyprus/France)
1999: Topsy-Turvy (UK)
2000: The Weight of Water (France)
2001: No Man’s Land (Slovenia)
2001: From Hell (UK/US)
2002: Dogville

Source: Her Brilliant Career: Honoring Katrin Cartlidge (1961-2002) – Bright Lights Film Journal

Mike Leigh Meets the Cure: The Three-Chord Nostalgia of Career Girls

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One of the most iconic rock bands of the eighties provides the soundtrack to this poignant portrait of friendship and lost youth.

By Mark Asch

It’s the mid-1980s, and a student in a black leather jacket walks down the hall of Polytechnic of North London. Her hair is dyed a shocking orange, maybe to pull focus from her face, which is raw and scaly with dermatitis. She’s curled around herself, afraid to look up, but you know she feels your eyes on her—watch the way her muscles flinch, so close to her skin. Quick: What’s her favorite band?

In Mike Leigh’s Career Girls (1997), we first encounter that young woman, Annie (Lynda Steadman), all grown-up, skin clear, on her way from the Northeast to reconnect with her former uni roommate, citydweller Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), over the course of a weekend. It’s ten years on from their first meeting, and Hannah wants to know if Annie thinks London has changed much over the past half-decade. She thinks a minute: “It has and it hasn’t.” This throat-achingly bittersweet film about time and place—about aging and friendship and the things that change and the things that stay the same—evokes the simultaneous distance and immanence of the past with the only musical act on the soundtrack: the Cure.

No band since the three-chord revolution has been more associated with the vulnerability of youth, with emotions too private to share and too massive to keep private. Robert Smith’s gloomily masochistic love songs and look-at-me-don’t-look-at-me goth getup hit hardest when you’re at your most melodramatic and edgy. Forever after, listening to the Cure triggers a full-body shiver of adolescence, like the red-hot sear of pot smoke at the back of your throat. You feel, in retrospect, mortification and loving indulgence for your younger, new-skinned self, and the old mood of luxurious self-pity takes a different shade: Do you still listen to pop music the way you did when you were younger? Do you still get emotional over art? Do you still get emotional over anything, the way you used to?

For Career Girls, his follow-up to the Palme d’Or–winning Secrets and Lies (1996), Leigh approached the Cure about using their music in the film, and the band accepted on the condition that they not share the soundtrack with any other act. Leigh used five tracks off 1983’s singles collection Japanese Whispers, plus the 1984 track “The Caterpillar,” to score Annie and Hannah’s college days. Such synching of his sensibility with that of a pop group remains unique in Leigh’s oeuvre, though upon release more attention was paid to the film’s use of flashbacks. Leigh was by then renowned for his extensive preproduction work with actors, developing their characters through improvisation before going off to write them into a script. Here, much of the backstory generated in that initial collaboration goes on-screen, beginning when Annie shows up to interview for the open bedroom in Hannah’s flat.

Twitchiness is the operative metaphor here: the Cure’s early output—spiky, angsty postpunk, vacillating between dark antisocial posing and excitable riffing—is a synecdoche for the behavioral tics of youth. In their first meeting, Annie worries at her rampant dermatitis, and stares down or holds her head atilt, seemingly physically unable to raise her eyes to meet Hannah’s. Hannah pulls faces, throws eyebrows, and tells private jokes in a voice that’s elastic and strident almost to the point of aggressive; her words are a carapace. She has to say something, even if it’s a flagrantly hurtful observation about Annie’s scabby cheek. She does voices and speaks in puns (compulsive wordplay being a common affliction of Leigh’s characters). “Lovecats” is on the stereo—that yelping cosplay anthem of sexual neediness disguised as a cutesy, kittenish “bite and scratch”—and a love of the Cure is the first thing Hannah and Annie bond over. Like their apartment, and their friendship, it’s a space they can share; the music’s nervous energy matches their own.

But spaces change; gentrification is inevitable. (London real estate is key to this roommate drama, and it’s notable that the film’s only significant speaking part who doesn’t appear in any of the eighties flashbacks is a boorish futures trader, played by Andy Serkis, who lives in a luxury high-rise overlooking the Thames.) Cutting back and forth between a nineties present and an eighties past, Career Girls shows us the way the idiosyncrasies of youth are subsumed into the equilibrium (more or less) of adult personality—just as, for the nineties scenes, the music of the Cure gives way to the aural earth tones of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s score. Fevered hormonal oscillations are smoothed out by supper-club smooth jazz. Punk is dead, sacrificed on the altar of adulthood. Skin clears up, twitches still themselves, without your doing. Time just . . . passes. Though old habits still resurface, like acne scars in a flush, Steadman gives Annie’s voice less of a quaver in the nineties scenes, and Cartlidge makes her voice less muscular. While their place in college was dark and dirty as a dive bar, with movie posters barely visible in the blue-lit murk, the old roomies reconnect in thirty-year-old Hannah’s attic flat in Kentish Town, which has a garden view and creamy walls reflecting natural light.

It’s Annie and Hannah’s grubby old student flat, over a Chinese takeaway at the corner of Rousden Street in Camden, that’s the film’s key location, chief among the many memories that come “flooding back” to Annie as she returns to a city still littered with traces of a life that used to be hers—especially of one moment forever linked in her mind with a Cure song. The film turns on memories of Hannah and Annie’s one-time couch-crasher Ricky (Mark Benton). Ricky, with his baby fat and greasy hair—shaved on the sides, long in the back—moves in with his armloads of records and blank tapes, and soon enough becomes a regular at the takeaway downstairs, making late-night runs for curry and chips. Guileless and helpless, Ricky rubs his face with his index finger—it’s his young-adult tic—and he squints when he talks, tightly. He can’t finish a sentence any more than he can read a room, though it’s painfully clear he has lots to say.

One Saturday night, the three of them are home in the flat, Annie and Hannah pogoing around the living-room floor to “The Walk.” Carried along by the music, their movement brings their whole selves to the surface with heart-tearing transparency. Annie sways, head down; Hannah marches, almost martial. Ricky sits this one out on the couch, slouching but rapt—and so they make a project of him, grabbing an arm apiece and pulling him up. “Want to see you dancing,” Hannah says over the music, encouraging Ricky’s offbeat little hops. As Robert Smith sings, “I kissed you in the water / and made your dry lips sing,” Ricky falls into rhythm. These kids are not cool, but the scene nevertheless has the feeling of a happy memory, one of those dorm-room Polaroids that ever after stands in for the most emotional, eventful few years of your life.

Through a cloud formed of the smoke of several hours’ cigarettes, Ricky’s odd, repetitive hand gestures could almost be a dance move; he can shake his head and sway without worrying about taking up too much space. His haircut even looks punk. It’s the most natural any of them appear in the college years—their uncertain, stop-start presence in the physical world is in rhythm with the jumpy, joyful music. The post-chorus keyboard zips up and down—“The Walk” was the Cure’s first Top 20 hit, and the beginning of their transition into a poppier sound, into a polished New Wave shimmer and wide mainstream acceptance. Ricky lets loose too, plays air guitar and screams; then they all scream, explode unself-consciously out into the world.

After Hannah pointedly goes to bed before Annie and Ricky, the music stops, and what follows is the cringiest of undergraduate rituals: two awkward people getting drunk together and letting their guard down until one of them chokes out an ill-advised, humiliating pass.

But it’s college—everyone’s awkward at that age, right? In their youth, and then in wistful reminiscence, Hannah and Annie are too naive to recognize what we eventually come to understand: that what they were seeing wasn’t just an awkward phase like theirs, but the undiagnosed symptoms of incipient mental imbalance. It is so unfair, what ends up happening to Ricky—so random and yet unappealable, that time soothes Annie and Hannah’s tics and not his, that they gain from its passage at least as much as they lose.

Alone in your room, listening to the Cure, you can hear yourself, your own stuttery, hesitant desires and fears, and somewhere within this identification is an invitation—to begin, as the band did with “The Walk,” to move toward others, to dance to their rhythm. It’s so unfair that Annie and Hannah’s memories of their awkward youth become a font of richness for their future selves in a way that his never can.

But you can’t go home again: in this city filled with private ghosts, the permanence of places just highlights the impermanence of the people who fill them. (And just think what the rent must be on Rousden Street all these decades on.) When Annie and Hannah stop by their old flat, the Chinese takeaway is boarded up, and wheatpasted posters over the windows advertise the new release by the Cure. (It’s Wild Mood Swings, the Used bin staple of the late nineties and early ’00s, released with Britpop and Blair ascendant, and the twenty-year retro cycle about to claim the Cure as an “eighties band” for millennial students.) Suddenly a stranger in her own history, Hannah marvels: “I haven’t listened to them for ages.” Sentimental Annie does, “now and again.” Is there any doubt that she, like Robert Smith, remembers everything?

Career Girls is now available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

Source: Mike Leigh Meets the Cure: The Three-Chord Nostalgia of Career Girls | Current | The Criterion Collection

Bill Antoniou takes a look at the films of British master filmmaker Mike Leigh

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Whenever people tell me that Mike Leigh is one of their favourite filmmakers, I’m always surprised to hear it.  Even though he’s also one of mine, I forget to think of him as an actual filmmaker.

His brilliant work is derived from his achievements in theatre and it bears those origins on screen, though I don’t mean that as criticism. He returns to some character archetypes frequently (the soulful homeless man, the hopelessly chirpy working-class woman) and the conflicts he puts his characters through feel like the stuff of stage drama. He makes them relevant in cinema from the beginning, then as he goes along, directing more films and making his multi-levelled narratives feel more cinematic. (Meantime just feels like watching people, while Another Year plays almost like a thriller.)

A common mistake people make about Leigh’s work is saying that it is improvised. It’s absolutely not, but is rather a script created from work that he does with his actors, creating characters from birth to death and putting them in situations together in which their improvised interactions eventually result in a finished work. In the eighties, he revolutionized the kitchen-sink melodrama. These films were celebrated for nailing the anxieties of the less fortunate under Thatcher’s conservative reign. In the nineties, he applied his observations of simple lives in the less glamorous parts of London to high concept dramas (and in the case of his Palme d’Or-winning Secrets & Lies, created his masterpiece).

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