One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
Seconds earlier, she was wistfully glancing out of the window at a string of neighboring flats. Seconds before that, she was teetering into her cramped East End home in full dress after an uncomfortable outing to her sister’s in Chigwell. Now she’s pouring four cups of tea for her husband, two sons, and herself. And soon it will be revealed that everything in the flat is secretly broken. Thatcherism is in full swing.
Meantime was Mike Leigh’s first foray into film after a decade of cutting his teeth in television. His career roots manifest themselves as a piano-sax theme akin to soaps and a generally unlikeable host of aimless characters. The film is a deliberate blend of both mediums, but the sense of disconnect between the two is well spent here. The camera pans across the kitchen slowly, revealing half-empty condiment bottles beside biscuits and pots. It lingers, as it so often does in Leigh’s oeuvre, on a cramped space that feels vacant. The shot itself is generous: politically, viewers can gauge the inescapable malaise fostered by bad premiership and recession. The composition is split between Mavis’ (Pam Ferris) hand in the foreground, an embodiment of emotional labor revealed only through the simple act of pouring tea, and the men, all of whom are reclined a few feet away, deadpan, their bodies stretched to all ends of the couches as laughter and applause emanate from the TV set. Her hand is steady and the only indication of movement is the smoke frozen between her husband’s (Jeffrey Robert) lips. It’s an image of work versus leisure where everyone is a victim of circumstance and some are just better at hiding it than others. As she pours, her body out of frame, Mavis can see her family through a glass pane. It might as well be another window.