Not all of Leigh's films are comedies, but Bleak Moments, his critically acclaimed first feature, sheds light on what Leigh is about in the comedies while being itself "a relentless downer," in the director's own words. Of course, it is only that in the sense that a play by Beckett or Pinter is "a downer"-for here is Theater of the Absurd transposed to the cinema of realism, a drama of non-communication whose bleakest moments, in retrospect, might also be its most comically absurd. Sylvia (Anne Raitt) is an attractive clerical worker who leads a strangely Victorian existence: She shares a dreary office with Pat, a woman who uses sweet shyness as cover for a certain aggressivity; and shares her suburban home with her mentally retarded sister, Hilda, who periodically emerges from chronic inwardness with a violent blow to the chops. Sylvia, not surprisingly, likes a nip now and then. Her attempts to engage a schoolteacher, Peter, in intercourse (verbal and otherwise) and have a bit of fun with the disheveled hippy, Norman, who rents her garage, are frustrated by all of their inability to communicate in anything more engaging than mumbles and tics-a kind of British reticence in extremis. When she gets them all together for a tea party, the silence is deafening. Hilda's presence underscores the problems of the so-called non-handicapped people around her, who display an inherent fear of penetration remarkably similar to her own.