Mike Leigh’s “The Short and Curlies”

Mike Leigh‘s 1987 short film, The Short and Curlies, is a story of young love in suburban purgatory. Although “love” doesn’t quite capture it. The film is about Joy, a pharmacist who hates her life, and her gangly, greasy, jokey suitor Clive (played by a very young, cute David Thewlis) and Joy’s hairdresser and the hairdresser’s sad daughter Charlene. “On the one hand there is ritual, physical indignity, rubber, prevention; on the other, new life, love , marriage. Charlene slips sadly and silently between two stools…” See any similarities between The Short and Curlies and Napoleon Dynamite?