Some filmmakers like to go easy on you with pacifying stories, appealing characters and reassuring worldviews. Mike Leigh is having none of that. For the past half century, this formidablereal slots online, rigorous British filmmaker has been making movies that, when they’re not making you gasp with laughter, take the wind out of you as quickly as a gut punch. He makes acidly funny and bitter movies, and is adept at both. The titles of some of those films suggest his expansive interest in the breadth, depth and ordinary poetry of the human comedy: “Bleak Moments,” “High Hopes,” “Life Is Sweet,” “Naked,” “Happy-Go-Lucky.”
The title of his new movie, “Hard Truths,” could easily work for many of his earlier films. It’s the first that he has directed since “Peterloo,” his stirring 2019 historical epic about a brutal, 1819 military and paramilitary assault on peaceful protesters seeking parliamentary reform and tax relief. More elaborate than many of his movies, “Peterloo” is nevertheless of a piece with Leigh’s work, with its richly drawn characters eloquently voicing ideas and ideals. “Let the friends of radical reform persevere,” a crusader tells a room of workers whose tired faces still carry the spark of hope. “Courage is a kind of salvation,” a line that feels like an ethos.
“Hard Truths” is a return for Leigh to smaller-scaled, more intimate and, at least at first glance, more narrowly focused movies. Set in contemporary London, it turns on two middle-aged sisters, the bilious Pansy (a dazzling Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and her sweet, infinitely patient younger sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin, lovely). Each has a small family, a settled home and a slight Caribbean lilt, and together they share heartache: The five-year anniversary of their mother’s death is upon them. But the women’s similarities end there because while Chantelle is a warmhearted giver, Pansy is something else entirely.
What Pansy is — in body and in soul — is at the center of “Hard Truths,” a visually unadorned, often sharply funny and painful movie about ordinary joys and hurts along with more inchoate agonies. The vivacious Chantelle, alit with easy, generous smiles, is blissfully open to everyone, to the clients at her salon and to her family, even her furious, pinched sister. She finds succor in other people and, it seems, purpose. Pansy, by contrast, seems to have locked herself in a prison of her own making and tossed away the key, though there are plenty of hints that she has been nudged into solitary confinement by larger alienating forces. She’s an excruciatingly lonely character who seems untethered to anything other than her dyspepsia.
The movie opens with Pansy waking up in bed with a gasping holler, as if emerging abruptly from a nightmare. It proves a fitting intro for the character who, with her wary, exhausting defensiveness, seem haunted. It’s puzzling why. Looking in from the outside, she appears to want for little. She has all the trappings of a comfortably solid, middle-class life, but there’s a generic aspect to her immaculately kept house, a warren with the charm of a corporate hotel that she watches over hawklike. It’s no wonder that her husband, Curtley (David Webber), a plumber with his own company, and their adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), move about the house like unhappy guests, their heads similarly bowed heads and steps heavy.
Scene by scene, Leigh brings the sisters’ worlds into view with pointillist detail. As always, he is particularly sensitive to the spaces they inhabit and to the material conditions of their lives, including how homes can become nests or jail cells and, inevitably, serve as microcosms of greater social realities. There’s meaning in these spaces, in the eerie sterility of Pansy’s house and in the unnaturalness of her yard, a square of green nearly as featureless and uniform as a color sample. There’s meaning too in contrasting the warmth of Chantelle’s home and salon, welcoming places alive with personal touches and the laughter of women, including that of her effusive, loving adult daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown).
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