
Run time: 97 mins
Reuniting with the magnificent Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Mike Leigh’s new film is a deeply sober, sombre, yet compassionate drama with flashes of humour.
Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) is constantly angry, yelling at everyone from her husband and adult son to store clerks. There is little plot in Hard Truths, but there is a trajectory. While Pansy seems like a harridan at first, she comes to be heartbreaking in her sadness, her sense of being persecuted by the world.
So why is she like this? Leigh brings us a little closer to the answer by showing us Pansy’s good-natured sister, Chantelle (Michele Austi) and her family, who are shown by Leigh to exist in an opposite state of happiness to Pansy’s misery. At times, we see Pansy become aware of her own emotional unsteadiness, which makes it all the more painful to witness, but these moments also bring surprising laughs.
Leigh has produced a fantastic body of work over the years; his working-class characters have a specificity that can only come from deep familiarity, and they resonate because they feel like variations on people we might have known.