It's been six years since Mike Leigh stepped behind the camera for the disappointing Peterloo but this film is a return to tip top form. In fact, by my reckoning, that 2018 historical record was his only career misstep. And in Naked, Secrets and Lies and Happy-Go-Lucky, he has written and directed some of the very best British films of all time.
Hard Truths reunites him with one of the stars of Secrets and Lies, Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She plays Pansy, an angry, fearful misery guts who can't help but annoy her family (and members of the public) with her constant, nasty invective. At first, her moaning is quite funny until the realisation that this woman is suffering takes hold.
Pansy is married to plumber Curtley (David Webber) and they have a son in his early 20s, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) who doesn't say much and stays in his room playing flight simulator games. Both these guys deal with Pansy in their own way, in quiet despondency. Her only real friend is her sister, Chantelle (Michelle Austin), who runs a hair salon and has two grown daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown).
The film is virtually plotless, like many of Leigh's films, but that's the point of his work. The scene setting, immersing the audience into the lives of the characters, getting to know the people, and feeling less like a voyeur, and more like one of the family/group, that's how Leigh crafts his work. Even though I only lived there for 2 years, I felt a pang of homesickness watching this, mainly due to the London Caribbean accents and the street scenes (some of it was filmed in my old manor, Harlesden).
The stories told by customers at Chantelle's salon are mundane but pricelessly realistic, and Curtley's offsider Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone) adds to the feeling of normalcy outside our immediate focus. When Pansy leaves the house to go shopping, her interactions with shop staff and other passers-by are cringingly awkward, like Larry David but with less humour.
The film is frustrating in that there is no resolution but brilliant in that there is no resolution. The ending actually caught me by surprise. We're led to hope that Moses gets some escape route from this miserable family life in his final scene, but that Curtley and Pansy are probably stuck in their bereft cycle for some time to come.
Hard Truths is playing now at Luna and Palace cinemas (check listings for other cinemas in Australia and elsewhere - it's showing at the Vue Cinema in Finchley too, where some of the film was shot).
See also:
Definitely Secrets and Lies (1996), for Jean-Baptiste's vastly different character. And one other Leigh masterpiece, Naked (1993).
SOME SPOILERS IN POD!!
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