"What's round and incredibly violent?" "A vicious circle." Back in Mike Leigh territory, we meet Clive of the never-ending knock-knock jokes; his new amour, Joy, the chemists' shopgirl who prescribes from personal experience; Joy's constant hairdresser, who itches in impossible places; and the hairdresser's daughter, Charlene, a youthful incarnation of age-old despair. As we discovered in the Mike Leigh retrospective of the 1986 San Francisco Film Festival, Leigh is the (unofficial) chronicler of a way of life: the tyranny and the exquisite agony of being British, specifically the nuances, postures and moods of the lower middle class. It's a vicious circle that never loses interest or spontaneity in Leigh's vision, at once pathetic and sympathetic.