Awareness of Mike Leigh’s famous technique – improvising scripts from an initial singularity – invites speculation about the film that got away. Never more so than with his flintily moving return to the domestic miseries of north London.
The director has been characteristically frank about Hard Truths being rejected by the Cannes and Venice film festivals (events he had previously won) before going on to huge acclaim and countless critical awards. Perhaps the festival selectors thought the new feature too “small”.
Leigh belatedly follows up the sprawling historical epics Mr Turner and Peterloo with a taut study of the perpetually sad Pansy Deacon. Reuniting with Leigh more than a quarter of a century after her Oscar-nominated turn in his Secrets and Lies, Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives us an emotionally inaccessible wife and mother who rails against the very flowers in the street. “People? Can’t stand them – grinning people,” Pansy, who is of Caribbean descent, spits.
Sometimes her tirades are properly hilarious. “And you can pipe down, standing there like an ostrich!” she snaps at a tutting woman in a queue.
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For the most part, however, we are moved by the varyingly enthusiastic efforts of her family to break the wall of hostility. Her husband, Curtley (David Webber), a successful plumber, looks to have largely given up. Her introverted son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), makes occasional efforts but spends most of his time in his room, pondering an enthusiasm for aircraft.
Women often try a bit harder. Chantelle (superb, warm Michelle Austin), her younger sister, makes sure to include Pansy in family gatherings despite the inevitability of discord.
So the film that got away? One can easily imagine a wider ensemble piece that gives us more of Chantelle and her vibrant, funny family. She picks up yarns as a hairdresser. Her daughters have whispers of adventure. If things were different, Hard Truths could have fleshed out and celebrated those lives. But reality bites. “The length, in the end, is ... a function of the low budget,” Leigh told me.
No matter. Limitations often evolve into virtues. The tight focus on Pansy forces us to consider the family’s accommodations with their unforgiving relative. This is a fearsome, relentless performance by Jean-Baptiste. There is no attempt to diagnose Pansy, but the words “clinical depression” will be in many viewers’ minds.
The actor’s great achievement is to generate sympathy for a woman who allows those around her not a moment of consideration. Her mood is a great sadness for husband, son and sister but a genuine tragedy for the woman herself. “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Chantelle asks. “I don’t know,” is all Pansy can manage.
Leigh’s strand of social realism has always been coloured – some might say compromised – by broad contrasts and marginal sentimentality. We get some of the latter in a too-convenient coda for Moses. We get a bit of the former with the light of Chantelle set against the darkness of Pansy.
More than a few critics have, indeed, argued that Pansy is the complementary flip (note the chiming floral nomenclature) of Poppy, the relentlessly jolly character played by Sally Hawkins in Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, from 2008.
There is hardly any point asking Leigh, at 81, to be anything other than what he has always been. Hard Truths, featuring a lovely lilting score by Gary Yershon and shot with clarity by the late Dick Pope, confirms that cinematic artifice can sit happily beside the most uncompromising anatomisations of human imperfection.
For all his attention to Pansy’s pathological abrasiveness, Leigh is not above folding some sweetness into the open-ended conclusion. We’ve seen him do that before. We’ve seen him do much of this before. The stratagems continue to deliver results more than half a century after they were first employed. A knotty, rough-hewn marvel.
In cinemas from Friday, January 31st
