High Hopes (1989)

• 78%
• 1989
• Comedy
• Drama
• Mike Leigh
• Phil Davis
• Ruth Sheen
• Edna Doré

The stories of a diverse group of Londoners is presented, they thrown together out of circumstance. Couple Cyril and Shirley, a motorcycle courier and gardener respectively, live in a flat overlooking Kings Cross Station. They generally espouse Marxism and the rights of the workers, and while Cyril is arguably more philosophical about their political views, he also doesn't believe that an uprising of the working class will ever happen. While they deal with their more militant friend Suzi who Cyril calls out for what he sees as her hypocritical attitude, and with a stranger named Wayne who has just arrived in the city for a job while unable to connect with his sister with who he was supposed to stay, they have a disagreement of their own as Shirl contemplates having a baby, which Cyril believes is a bad idea in this world. They rarely associate with Cyril's sister Valerie and her used car lot dealer husband Martin. Nouveau riche, narcissistic Valerie is all about presenting herself as well-off, while she is totally neglected by brash Martin, who is a chronic philanderer. Cyril, Shirl and Valerie only need to speak to each other in their respective interactions with Cyril and Valerie's seventy year old mother, Mrs. Bender, who still lives on her own in a council house, but who is just starting to show signs of dementia. Cyril, Shirl, Valerie and Mrs. Bender eventually meet the latter's relatively new neighbors, wealthy, snobbish and somewhat garish husband and wife Rupert and Lætitia. While Rupert and Lætitia are openly perturbed by needing to help helpless Mrs. Bender, which is only exacerbated by meeting the other three, Valerie can only do her best to ingratiate herself with people wealthier than her.