They fumble and grope and exchange banalities so pitiful they are painful, until she finally excuses herself to the loo, hits the door and walks for hours, leaving the poor bloke practicing his lines and checking his watch while he thinks the girl is taking the longest pee in history. Then, on the same day that Debbie's hubby loses her son, Molly's husband mysteriously quits work. Life is miserable. Life is awful. Life is terrible.
Life is too much.
What makes this ecstasy of agony bearable is Winterbottom's technique. Employing methods devised by Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, he shoots the entire movie in a cinema verite style, with hand-held cameras in actual streets and clubs and hospitals. If the actors are remembering lines, they're remembering them as if they're improvising them on the spot or, more to the point, living them on the spot. The result is an almost seamless sense of reality, or rather realism without the stylizations of cinema. The movie has a feeling of documentary, and its feature-film tropes aren't immediately visible.