Mike Leigh’s Bafta-nominated Hard Truths will make you laugh and cry

There are Pansy Deacons all over the place. She’s the focus of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths – a vessel of formless rage played by Bafta nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste. When a furniture store employee dares to ask her if she needs help, she immediately snaps back with “Are you threatening me?” and demands to speak to the manager. She picks fights with customers behind her in the checkout queue, with her dentist, with other drivers – with anyone, really, who dares enter her orbit. She complains about charity workers (too cheery), dogs in coats (arrogant), and well-dressed babies (“What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s it going to keep in its pocket, a knife?”).

We’re used to this kind of everyday spectacle. The public display of nonconformism. Erratic behaviour. Eccentric garb. Sudden outbursts. We watch these strangers with crooked smiles, betraying some combination of fear, bemusement, and sympathy. Or perhaps, instead, we stare down at the floor and try to disappear them from our minds.

These, though, are exactly the sort of people Leigh has always shown an interest in: be it the curdled, isolated masculinity of David Thewlis’s Johnny Fletcher in Naked (1993), or the boundless cheer of Sally Hawkins’s Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). And when we talk about realism in Leigh’s work, about his particular methodology of using extensive rehearsals to develop his scripts in tandem with his casts, it’s ultimately about interrogating that spectacle.

In the small and gradual reveal of her life – scene by scene, mundane incident by mundane incident – we start to see Pansy’s rage as sorrow. It’s a symptom of life history, social circumstances, and, inevitably, a sprinkle of late-stage capitalistic ennui. Pansy’s anger is so outsized that, from a distance, it seems almost parodic. Leigh – one of the best chroniclers of Britain, past and present – is wise enough not to stifle the instinct to laugh. In fact, Pansy has some pretty solid one-liners: “Your balls are so backed up you’ve got sperm in your brain!”

She also has health issues, chronic migraines and muscle aches – they’re either the source of her stress or a symptom of it. She’s wife to a nervous, uncommunicative husband (David Webber) and mother to a son (Tuwaine Barrett), implied to be autistic, that she doesn’t know how to care for. There’s never any quiet, never any rest. Her mother died recently. She hasn’t dealt with it as well as her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, luminous) because of the differences in their childhoods. “I want it all to stop,” Pansy tells her, in a rare moment of clarity.

Leigh, working with regular cinematographer Dick Pope, who died last October, renders small beauties out of the ordinary. We’re drawn in close to Jean-Baptiste’s features (the actor reunites with Leigh after her breakout in his 1996 film Secrets & Lies) – titanic in their expressiveness, twisted by an unseen poison. The actor never shaves down any of Pansy’s thorns, but lets us love her despite them.

Hard Truths withholds catharsis, instead choosing simply to let the shutters swing open on its protagonist’s psyche for a brief interlude. After being presented with a small, perhaps meaningless gesture of kindness, Pansy’s lips start to quiver, then tear open with hysterical laughter swiftly followed by angry, ancient-sounding sobs. No one in her family knows what to say. They simply let her weep. But Leigh has shown us all we need to see, the soul inside that’s always been easier to ignore.

Dir: Mike Leigh. Starring: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone. Cert 12A, 97 mins.

‘Hard Truths’ is in cinemas from 31 January