‘Hard Truths’ Review: Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste Reunite for Quiet Gem

Pansy, the central character in “Hard Truths,” British director Mike Leigh’s first film in six years, is one of the most unpleasant, off-putting and utterly exhausting characters to grace a movie screen in years. And the fact that we feel for Pansy by the end of the 97 minutes of Leigh’s spare and wrenching gem is one of the small miracles of an extraordinarily moving film.

From “Naked” to “Secrets & Lies,” “Vera Drake” to “Topsy Turvy,” “Happy-Go-Lucky” to “Mr. Turner,” Leigh has been a craftsman whose films are impressive vehicles for creating empathy for difficult characters — or, rather, for difficult people, so rich and true do they appear.

“Hard Truths” brings Leigh back to a contemporary story for the first time since “Another Year” in 2010, with his last two movies being the period pieces “Mr. Turner” in 2014 and “Peterloo” in 2018. And it reunites him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the actress who broke out in Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies” 28 years ago and returns to his fold with shattering results.

Within a few minutes of the film’s opening, we see Pansy awaken in her bedroom with a scream — and over the course of “Hard Truths,” it becomes clear that this is how she usually wakes up. She wakes in fear and anger, lives in fear and anger — afraid to go out in the garden of her home on the outskirts of London, afraid to let her son go for a walk for fear that a Black teenager on the street will be picked up by the police, afraid of every noise and startled by the phone every time it rings.

Pansy — it almost seems cruel that she sports that flowery name — sleeps with a frown, and when her husband asks, “You good?” her instant answer is a shouted “No!”

She berates her son and her husband over dinner, then moves on to the people she sees outside: the charity workers who want her money, the dog walkers who put coats on their animals, the young mothers who dress their babies in clothes that have pockets. “Cheerful grinnin’ people,” she says, spitting the words out. “Can’t stand ’em out there.”

The camera hones in on Pansy, and Jean-Baptiste is simultaneously riveting and tough to watch. It’s hard to acknowledge that your heart is breaking for somebody that relentlessly ugly — but as exhausting as it is to watch her and listen to her, the film has the power to pose a simple question: What must it be like to be her?

Pansy’s sister Chantal, played by Michele Austin, is a study in contrasts, with a cheerful relationship with two daughters who are themselves thriving even as they put up with routine humiliations at the hands of white colleagues. Almost every word out of Pansy’s mouth is angry, but Chantal is the one person who occasionally gets something closer to resignation.

“Mother used to say, ‘Why can’t you go out? Why can’t you enjoy life?'” Pansy sighs when she reluctantly accompanies Chantal to their mother’s grave.

“Why can’t you enjoy life?” Chantal says.

“I don’t know,” says Pansy, and then a few minutes later she elaborates: “I’m so tired. I just want to lie down and close my eyes. I want it all to stop.”

Leigh famously convenes his actors for months of workshopping in which they build their characters and the story slowly begins to take shape, and the result is almost unbearably subtle and intimate. Conflict builds in glances that carry years of history behind them, or in the smallest of gestures; Pansy tightens her jaw, just a bit, and we sense that she’s on the verge of exploding but is fighting that urge because she’s in her sister’s kitchen.

Cinematographer Dick Pope, who has made more than a dozen movies with Leigh, catches the claustrophobia in Pansy’s world; Gary Yershon’s score slowly slides from unobtrusive chamber music to something edgier and more astringent.

Not much happens, apart from life passing in front of the camera. Pansy has glimpses of self-awareness, maybe, and she acknowledges despair rather than simply responding with anger. But does that mean she can change?

“I go out and … things happen,” she says, explaining to Chantal why she tries not to leave her house.

“What kind of things?”

A pause. “People.”

And that’s “Hard Truths,” in a nutshell: people. People you won’t forget, courtesy of a handful of remarkable actors and a singular director who at the age of 81 remains a true treasure.

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