MARIANNE JEAN-BAPTISTE IN HARD TRUTHS

MIKE LEIGH: HARD TRUTHS (2024) - NEW YORKK FILM FESTIVAL

Starts hilarious and ends deeply sad

This brilliant film by the great Mike Leigh starts out hilarious and ends up deeply sad.

These are black working class Brits who live in bright, shiny new houses in a clean neighborhood. In fact cleanliness is an obsession of the protagonist, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), whose outspokenness about finding everything and everyone unsatisfactory is, initially, killingly funny. Leigh operates on the edge between parody and tragedy.

Leigh works as he has often done through a series of detached skit-like scenes with some different characters and some recurring ones. They visit a job workplace, a social gathering, home, a psychiatrist, a dentist, and a hairdresser's and we meet different people, usually in the company of Pansy. Some of the others tend to express themselves with the rancid forthrightness of Pansy, but none of them are as angry and unsatisfied as she is or so outrageously provocative and aggressive in speech. Words are a weapon with which she lashes out in every direction, indiscriminately.

Pansy goes over the edge, but Leigh chooses to keep her safe. No matter how much she insults her husband or people she meets, she gets away with it. But then on a visit to family, her unhappiness and desperation come to a head and the whole group is affected, especially her husband Curtley (David Webber). Later, it appears their desperate and aimless 20-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) may fall into a chance of normality when, while he sits in a great square of London, a young women sidles up to him.

Leigh's writing is blindingly brilliant here, ruthless, extreme, and absolute. It may seem to push the very limits of the surreal. But it also adeptly captures the vernacular so each line springs to rapid life. And strange though it may seem, there are moments here that awakened vivid memories of desperate moments of my own youth, so clearly Leigh touches an emotionally valid nerve.

No other filmmaker working in English today comes this close to the edge. Recommended for Mike Leigh fans and for the emotionally hardy. This is one of Leigh's best late efforts but not a warm one.

Hard Truths, 97 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 6, 2024. Shown also at the NYFF where it was screened for this review Oct. 2, 2024. Also shown at San Sebastián. Metacritic rating: 87%.A Bleecker Street release.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.