Rent High Hopes (1988)

Yuppie Uprising - High Hopes review by Steve

This is the start of Mike Leigh's period as a big screen chronicler of British social and political divisions. About a decade into the Thatcher revolution and at back end of the me-decade, the writer-director mostly reflects on our lack of kindness. This is comic-realism set in the newly gentrified London around King Cross.

Now it is an '80s time capsule and younger viewers might need some annotation. But the theme of the erosion of working class values is still valid. Phil Davis and Ruth Sheen play a couple of thirty-something Marxists in low paid work at a time when socialism has lost its energy, or worse; seems irrelevant or cranky.

She wants a baby, but he has no faith in the future. There's a support cast of grotesque caricatures, with Dave Bamber and Lesley Manville as snooty neighbours from hell and Philip Jackson and Heather Tobias as vulgar consumerists who found no joy in the conservative ideals of small business and home ownership.

Most memorable is Edna Doré as Davis and Tobias' elderly mother who begins to lose her memory as the city changes beyond recognition. It's an actors film which is essentially a series of sketches, and more awkwardly sad than funny. But- as usual- Leigh captures the zeitgeist better than any of his contemporaries.