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Career Girls By Amanda Caldwell | Career Girls, the newest film by British director Mike Leigh, concerns two women who roomed together as university students and are now having a low-key reunion, several years later. Leigh's style of pulling together a film rather than writing a script and ordering particular performances from his actors sometimes works astoundingly well, as Secrets and Lies evidenced last year. But sometimes this laissez-faire style of directing and creating a film out of a few distinctive characters falls somewhat flat. Career Girls gives memorable characters but no plot, making the movie nothing beyond a character study. We see how the two women have changed since their college days through recurring flashbacks interspersed with scenes from their weekend together as adults. They have gained some control over their lives physically -- losing the illegal-drug habits -- and emotionally. They have grown in some ways -- Annie (Lynda Steadman) has achieved some measure of confidence; Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) has converted her brash criticism of the world into a more subdued but still jaded outlook, revealed now through casual cynicisms. But even with their overall change from 20-something slackers into cleaned-up, sophisticated women with admirable vocations, the title gives some clue that these are still girls, that they have not changed all that much -- that maybe being girls is their career. Beyond that, with no plot driving us forward, the film offers little other mental matter to chew on.