By Jake Wilson
HARD TRUTHS ★★★★
(M) 97 minutes
Now in his 80s, the British filmmaker Mike Leigh is widely regarded as one of the great originals of world cinema – but there’s never been any shortage of detractors to accuse him of “misery porn” or going over the top.
These critics are unlikely to be silenced by Hard Truths, which is nonetheless a return to the kind of thing Leigh does best – a small-scale character study set in suburban London in the present day. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who last worked with Leigh on the 1996 film Secrets and Lies, returns here as the unforgettable Patsy Deacon, a woman who has made misery into an entire way of life.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin play very different sisters in Hard Truths.
Afflicted with migraines and other possibly imaginary ailments, Patsy typically wakes with a shriek, goes about her day with a scowl, and inflicts her bad vibe on everyone around her. Her tirades are arias of scorn and contempt, aimed both at those she’s addressing and at any third parties unlucky enough to have come under her withering gaze.
“I’ve got a little list,” sang the Lord High Executioner in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado, the subject of Leigh’s 2000 backstage drama Topsy Turvy. Pansy has one too, which lengthens every time she appears.
Cheerful, grinning charity workers come in for her wrath, along with fat babies, the police, the decline in customer service, people who put booties on their dogs, younger women who physically remind her of mice or ostriches, doctors who take time off to attend funerals when they should be attending to their living patients …
Jonathan Livingstone and David Webber in a scene from Hard Truths.
Most of all, she denounces the other, largely silent members of her household, her husband Curtley (David Webber), who works as a plumber, and her unemployed adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Both have plainly come to take her flow of bitterness for granted, though they haven’t quite stopped listening.
Elsewhere in the film’s sunny suburban London, we meet Pansy’s much more cheerful sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), with a close relationship with her two adult daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) and a job in a beauty salon that serves as good practice for putting up with people rabbiting on.
Compared to Pansy, this whole side of the family glows with psychological health, but Leigh doesn’t entirely let his didactic side get the better of him. Pansy is an absurd and pitiful figure, incapable of even a moment of ordinary friendliness. But it’s possible to feel too that she’s built on a grander scale than anyone around her.
For those on Leigh’s wavelength, Hard Truths is his funniest film in many years, and as emotionally truthful as the title promises, despite a few flickers of sentimentality around the edges.
Leigh is not a strict realist, but nor are his films or the performances in them as stylised as is sometimes claimed: the “impossible” people who are his special province really do exist, and indeed are far from uncommon. If you can watch Hard Truths without experiencing regular shocks of recognition, I can only congratulate you on your good luck.
Hard Truths is in cinemas from today.
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