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\u2019s 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 \u2014 you ain\u2019t 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.\u00a0Errand running becomes a reign of terror through supermarkets and doctors\u2019 surgeries. \u201cAre you OK?\u201d the GP asks. \u201cNo, I\u2019m at the doctor\u2019s,\u201d 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 Plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and unemployed son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) have withdrawn into their shells.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\u2019s sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) lives with her young adult daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown). Their cramped flat is as happy as Pansy\u2019s house is not.\u00a0Family lunches bring dramatic tension. Showdowns, though, are limited. The Leigh signature remains the world\u2019s most awkward silence. And yet there are also differences \u2014\u00a0even evolutions \u2014 between the director\u2019s 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\u2019s Secrets & Lies, having played the lost biological daughter of a white mother. Now race takes a subtler role: one part of the characters\u2019 worlds among countless others.\u00a0That much feels tied up with the director\u2019s 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 v\u00e9rit\u00e9 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\u2019t always thus. In the past, you could feel invited to smirk at Leigh\u2019s hapless characters. Watching Pansy, mockery would die on your lips\u00a0\u2014 in the best sense. If we knew her in real life, we\u2019d 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.\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606In UK cinemas from January 31 and in US cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s latest,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":186688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-186687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186689,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186687\/revisions\/186689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}