Catholics and Protestants:
Four Days in July

February 11, 2008

Mike Leigh is at his best when catching class differences through the inflections of conversation and mannerisms. In American films it is generally assumed that everyone functions with a single mental operating system.. and the only real divisions are those of wealth and opportunity. Mike Leigh conceives of people as perceiving the world through multiple operating systems. This emphasis is present in later films like Topsy-Turvy (1999), but to my mind splendidly realized in Four Days in July (1985).

Four Days in July is a series of sketches of life in Northern Ireland. The sketches rotate between scenes from a poor Catholic couple and ones from a Protestant couple. The wife in both couples is pregnant.. and they end up delivering their babies at the same time.. and recuperating in a hospital bed right next to each other.

The conversations throughout the film are colorful and brilliantly inconsequential. These conversations are not so much for the purpose of moving the story forward as for portraying different ways of relating to the world.

The Catholic couple (above) are always talking to friends. They rely on locals to fix things around the house. There appears to be no book culture.. everything that matters is conveyed orally. There is no particular plan for getting through life. Everything is makeshift. The house seems like a collection of disparate elements. A picture of the Pope can be glimpsed hanging on a wall.

Watching and listening to the Protestant couple we discover a middle class way of life. The baby room is made up ahead of the arrival of the baby and decorated cutely. There are some books about. The husband is in the military and living according to schedule. We see him working out. He resists social visits to the family of his wife. He has buddies who come over to drink.. but no long informal talks with neighbors. There is a constant backdrop of national symbols.

Leigh obviously respects and prefers the Catholic version of life, with its neighborliness and sharing. But he deals fairly with the Protestant couple.. and portrays the way social connections are found in symbolic events like a bonfire or march.

In one scene the Protestant husband steps out to his car and gets ready to go to work. First he has to go through a little ritual of checking for bombs under his car. This unthinking caution (which we also see in other scenes) is part of the price of the Irish Protestant way of life. It could be viewed as the mental tax for maintaining the class system.

In the final scene the Catholic and Protestant mothers are in the same hospital room.. holding their newborn babies.

For a couple of minutes the two women talk, sharing the bond of an intense shared experience. They begin to realize their religious differences.. and the conversation drifts off. The Protestant woman (on the right) seems especially intent on not sharing anything more of a personal nature. It is a powerful ending because we are presented with the way the mental operating systems of class get replicated and passed on to the next generation.

What makes the film worth watching is its refusal to simply identify bad guys. We see two different modes of life at work.. two distinct mental operating systems. Having just re-read Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism I went back in my mind to Leigh's fully articulated vision of class divisions in Ireland. Four Days in July can be seen as an alternative to Weber's thesis. It shows a class system that happens to be defined along a religious boundary.. and not religious values getting worked out into the economic sphere.