AllMovie

Tart, sophisticated, and remarkably concise, this episodic British comedy showcased the wonderful vulnerability of Imelda Staunton more than a decade before Vera Drake earned her Oscar attention. As plain, mournful Jane, the less outwardly successful of the two title characters, Staunton bypasses any conventional notion of the perpetual bridesmaid. Her character may play second fiddle to Saskia Reeves' wonderfully self-absorbed Antonia, but she's also willfully idiosyncratic and frankly sexual. As for Antonia, Reeves, too, fleshes out her contradictions, subtly contrasting her materialism and offhanded betrayal with vibrancy and more than a little self-doubt. Neither actress could have cut through so many stereotypes with such ease if it weren't for Marcy Kahan's incisive screenplay and Beeban Kidron's pitch-perfect direction. Throw in the rakish Bill Nighy (as Antonia's feckless husband) and the deadpan Brenda Bruce (as the therapist who counsels each woman without the other's knowledge) and you've got a cast capable of selling Kahan's and Kidron's vision without breaking a sweat. Cinematic portrayals of the friendships between modern women tend to be trite and sentimental. The genius of Antonia & Jane is that its characters, and the bonds between them, are as complicated and messy as real life.