Another year - Mike Leigh's latest film

This was such an acute film, and beautifully made.

It is the story of a year in the life of a couple in their sixties, kind, happy and devoted to each other. Both are professionals and live in London, far from their Lancashire roots. They are extraordinarily kind to the more inadequate people around them, offering constant support and hospitality. They worry about their only son, a lawyer with Citizens Advice, as he seems to have no permanent relationship.

Everything changes when the son meets someone and brings her home. The friends suddenly become "pathetic" and "tragic" and the subject of rolling eyes and stage whispers. There is a breathless and anxious moment when the confident and feisty new girlfriend tells them about her own parents (her father is a postman) and then tells them that she herself is an occupational therapist.

The gap between generations is brilliantly portrayed, the friend in the middle a lost soul seeking for identity through acceptance as a girlish and helpless woman, at last in the final frame seeming to realise that this role is false, and her friends are adults for whom close family relationships will always come first. And that perhaps she herself has much greater value and strength than she had realised.

I interpret this film as a comment on contemporary Britain and its increasing inequalities, where family and aspiring middle class values become more important than recognising that we are ultimately all individuals with varying needs and levels of vulnerability and sensitiveness. A wider sense of community is lost, and many people fall through the gaps. Furthermore, since the credit squeeze, there is now a gap between aspiration and reality for almost everyone.

The film also touches on the way we sometimes mask our own needs by helping others, and on how destructive this can be.