It’s over 50 years since British filmmaker Mike Leigh made Bleak Moments – a debut title that set the tone for a career if ever there was one. Leigh is now 81, and his wise and painful new film, Hard Truths, is the story of a London woman, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a middle-aged wife and mother stuck in a cycle of anger and resentment that Leigh is not about to break simply because it would give us a sense of relief.
Pansy is played with remarkable power by Jean-Baptiste. Put simply: Pansy is a piece of work. She snaps constantly at her family, husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), and both of them are near-mute in the wake of her constant, bitter hectoring. She picks arguments in shops and car parks. She doesn’t have a nice word to say about anyone. The only person to whom she shows vulnerability is her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser whose warm rapport with her own grown-up, confident, happy daughters is in sad contrast to the absence of any real connection in Pansy’s suburban London household.
Bleak moments? There are too many here to count – so many, in fact, that they coalesce into an upsetting portrait of someone whose plunge into depression and self-loathing is deep. It also means the moments of joy and relief – and they’re here – are extremely welcome.
The moments of joy and relief are extremely welcome
In scale, this is a small film for Leigh; it feels contained and restricted. But that feels appropriate for Pansy: a character whose life has been reduced to hiding from the world mid-afternoon under the duvet. She is being suffocated by her own existence.
In tone and interest, Hard Truths is remarkably true to Leigh’s beginnings. It offers a gentle, inquiring curiosity about ‘everyday’ emotional lives; about what goes on behind closed doors; about the intimate relationship between character and place (often that place is London); about what Leigh himself has boiled down to ‘family stuff’.
It’s a film of deep empathy, but a tough one, too. Leigh and his collaborators don’t have any easy answers as to why Pansy is this way, or if she’ll ever be different. What they leave us with is a character who’s richly and roundly drawn – one who remains a mystery once we’re not in her alienating company, but also one who Leigh and Jean-Baptiste have created with palpable and intense care and compassion.
In US theaters now. In UK and Ireland cinemas on Jan 31, 2025.