Director – Mike Leigh – 2024 – UK – Cert. 12a – 97m
*****
A woman with a chip on her shoulder makes her own and her extended family’s lives a misery, as she does with everyone with whom she comes into contact – expertly crafted slice of Brit Misery Porn is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st
While her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and his assistant Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone) are out all day working, which seems to consist of removing plumbing fixtures and fittings from unoccupied houses, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) stays at home berating their 22-year-old, videogame-playing son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for being unemployed and lacking in ambition.
It’s as if the world has it in for Pansy, and she takes it out on anything and everything. Without realising what she is doing, she turns the family home into a place of misery, making her son and husband’s lives a living hell through no fault of their own.
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She couldn’t be more different from her sassy and outgoing sister Chantelle (Michelle Austin), who despite being abandoned by her husband has made a go of life, passing on her ‘can do’ spirit to her two moderately successful daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown).
Chantelle is trying to get Pansy to come with her to visit their mother’s grave next Saturday, but Pansy won’t commit either to that or to bring her family to visit Chantelle’s flat for a family gathering afterwards.
Leigh once again does here what he does best; a highly effective character study built from his carefully written script, embellished by flawless casting and much improvisation work on the part of his cast.
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Jean-Baptiste delivers a powerhouse performance as a woman who has imperceptibly drifted into a form of mental illness, a brilliant piece of work that’s not particularly pleasant to watch, a performance likely to alienate anyone who thinks the cinema is about having a pleasant time (discuss) even as it nets critics’ awards for watching the actress stretch the boundaries of her craft. Yes, it’s a prime slice of that nationally cherished British genre, Misery Porn.
Jean-Baptiste is the undeniable centre of the film, but others playing family members impress too, and Leigh throws in numerous memorable bit parts from other cast members, often only there for one scene. Pansy says the wrong thing to everyone she meets, be it customers or a salesperson (Alice Bailey Johnson) in a furniture store, people in a queue (Diveen Henry, Bryony Miller) for the cashier (Ashna Rabheru) at the supermarket checkout, or her doctor (Ruby Bentall) and dentist (Hiral Varsani). Particularly good is the scene where she stews in her driver’s seat in a car park and gets into a row with a motorist (Gary Beadle) who’s hoping she’ll move so he can get a parking space.
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She’s oblivious of her husband’s attempts to help and care for her, realised by Webber with considerable humanity, while Moses, not unlike his dad, is a loner who just wants to be left along to do his own thing, given a wonderfully down-at-heel quality by Barrett. Chantelle radiates as much warmth as her sister does coldness and vitriol, and you want to spend time with her as much as you want to get away from her sister.
As played by Austin, you believe Chatelle could somehow bring this family back together. She is given memorable scenes in the hairdressing salon where she works talking with colleagues and customers, while her daughters spawn compelling characters in their work colleagues – a tough and inconsiderate business executive boss (Samantha Spiro) in the case of Kayla, who refuses to back the latter’s well researched product pitch, and a superior who dumps extra workload on Aleisha because someone else has made a mistake which has come back to bite Aleisha.
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I’m not sure how much I believed it all (it feels very much like a Mike Leigh film in which he gets actors to do what they do in a Mike Leigh film) yet at the same time, it’s curiously absorbing. Many of the cast are black, and if Leigh’s prime objective was to put a casting directory of present day black, British acting talent on the screen, he has succeeded admirably.
That begs the question, why black people, and apart from the obvious retort – i.e., why not? – I can only assume that he had Jean-Baptiste in mind from the start, and it would therefore make sense to have a black family. I didn’t get a strong sense of black identity from the film, which is a shame given the excellent black cast playing the family members, but nor did I feel that white actors (or British actors of any other racial ethnicity, for that matter) would have made a huge difference.
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If it gives a bunch of black actors rather than white actors decent roles for a change, and it manages to avoid silly casting which leaves you wondering, why are black actors cast when the characters would need, e.g. historically, to be white (which isn’t the case here, but see The Personal History of David Copperfield, Armando Iannucci, 2019 or The Green Knight, David Lowery, 2021 where the filmmakers walk straight into this trap), then I don’t have a problem with that.
The film itself sees Mike Leigh on top form, so it will be interesting to see whether, given the deep British Misery Porn feel, the film’s many strengths resonate with British audiences to make it a hit. All I can say is, the film worked for me.
Hard Truths is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, January 31st.
Trailer: