Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Welcome back to Mike Leigh Land. (Start a long way from Hollywood, and keep walking.) As so often with his previous films, the veteran British director’s latest, Hard Truths, is an acid slice-of-life set behind seemingly ordinary front doors. Of course, his movies actually boast much variation on many themes, not least in the fine period pieces Topsy-Turvy and Mr Turner. Still, there is also an essential Leigh, to which even the title Hard Truths seems to give a doleful wink. From the man who in 1971 brought you Bleak Moments — you ain’t seen nothing yet!On brand too is the wider backdrop of suburban London. Here we find our heroine, Pansy, played with depth and precision by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Her spotless home is the character all over: pristine but joyless, painfully neat, four walls to be driven up. Daily life is endured with a scowl. For Pansy, nothing makes so little sense as other people. Errand running becomes a reign of terror through supermarkets and doctors’ surgeries. “Are you OK?” the GP asks. “No, I’m at the doctor’s,” Pansy fumes, aghast.Like a lot of Leigh films, Hard Truths feels like a comedy before revealing itself as not quite so simple. Pansy is beset by muscle aches and migraines. But they are all, we sense, bound up with her anguished psyche, a rolling misery that flattens everything in sight. Plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and unemployed son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) have withdrawn into their shells. At a safer distance, Pansy’s sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) lives with her young adult daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown). Their cramped flat is as happy as Pansy’s house is not. Family lunches bring dramatic tension. Showdowns, though, are limited. The Leigh signature remains the world’s most awkward silence. And yet there are also differences — even evolutions — between the director’s CV and Hard Truths. Most obviously, the film is predominantly about Black characters. Back in 1996, Jean-Baptiste was Oscar nominated for her turn in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, having played the lost biological daughter of a white mother. Now race takes a subtler role: one part of the characters’ worlds among countless others. That much feels tied up with the director’s working methods. Talk to enough British actors, and you may hear wry debate about the exact creative make-up of a Leigh film, in which the cast intensively develop their own characters, the dialogue they produce feeding into the film. We can presumably credit the actors, then, for much of the sense of casual vérité in a portrait of Black Londoners.But if the movie is culturally specific, it is no less acute about generally being human. Here again, it wasn’t always thus. In the past, you could feel invited to smirk at Leigh’s hapless characters. Watching Pansy, mockery would die on your lips — in the best sense. If we knew her in real life, we’d cross the road to avoid her. But Hard Truths brings her into transfixing close-up. And though the film wisely refrains from clinical diagnosis, it has an adult understanding of something important: that behind the local eccentric is often a sad tale of frail mental health and fraught personal history.Call it the sorrow of the ordinary front door, of which Hard Truths grows into a graceful study. Credit to Jean-Baptiste and the actors. And to Leigh, for making, at 81, one of the best films of his career. ★★★★☆In UK cinemas from January 31 and in US cinemas now
