Hard Truths: Mike Leigh’s graceful tragicomedy shows how irreplaceable he is in British cinema

The singular consistency of Mike Leigh’s 50-year-plus career making films for both big and small screen could be expressed simply by their titles. From the instructive moniker of his 1971 debut Bleak Moments onwards, year after another year, Leigh’s intensive explorations of everyday people strips them naked emotionally, revealing their high hopes and dreams, their secrets and lies. The ties, familial and otherwise, that can either offer a lifeline or a noose; all or nothing. Life is sweet, but also bitter. Leigh and his astonishing casts only deal in hard – and hard-won – truths.

If this suggests a certain interchangeability of subject and theme – and evidently there are numerous exceptions to this rule, notably his two most recent films, Mr. Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018) – that does a disservice to the specificity of vision revealed in each individual work.

Here, for example, Leigh focuses for the first time exclusively on Afro-Caribbean British families, chiefly two middle-aged sisters Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Chantelle (Michele Austin), their young adult children and Pansy’s husband Curtley (David Webber). The idea of a white male director centring Black British female lives might make some wary; but Leigh’s immersive, collaborative process empowers actors to embody and own their creations.

Hard Truths is Jean-Baptiste’s first Leigh role since her Oscar-nominated breakout in Secrets and Lies (1996). Pansy is a shocking contrast to her character in that film, the patient, empathetic Hortense. She spews vitriol at all comers, seeing only the worst in everyone and everything. Little wonder self-employed plumber Curtley and their reclusive, jobless son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) distantly orbit her in states of sullen, anxious despondency. Given her five-letter floral name, it’s tempting to see Pansy as the negative flipside to Sally Hawkins’s eternal optimist Poppy in Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (2008).

Chantelle, by contrast, is a cheerful, vivacious hairdresser who runs her own salon and is close to her two vibrant daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson). Their cramped, colourful high-rise flat marks them clearly not as financially well-off as Pansy in her antiseptic modern house – but theirs is a shared, loving home, whereas Pansy is like a dragon guarding the prisoners inside her spick-and-span but soulless castle.

Because this is a Mike Leigh film, though, little by little the drawbridge is lowered, allowing us to see the desperate, frightened woman trapped inside. She’s seemingly agoraphobic and germophobic, and probably suffering from OCD too; there’s past trauma calcified deep within, connected to her childhood and her late mother, Pearl. But not even Pansy can pinpoint the causes of her malaise. “Why can’t you be happy?” Chantelle pleads. Her sister’s despairing answer: “I don’t know!”

It isn’t completely morose: Leigh’s trademark tragicomic blend is most present in the outrageous insults Pansy unleashes, no less funny for the hostility of Jean-Baptiste’s delivery. It’s a fearless performance, perhaps encapsulated by a marvellous moment when she somehow laughs and cries at the same time. She’s matched step for step by Austin – another Leigh veteran, with roles in Secrets and Lies, where she was Hortense’s best friend, and Another Year (2010); their scenes together, haunted by a shared, unresolved past, are the film’s high points.

It’s unusual, then, that other narrative strands, notably single scenes with their kids, and other key characters, appear comparatively underdeveloped. Certain later actions and reactions by Webber’s Curtley, though cowed by and inured to his wife’s attacks, feel frustratingly opaque. Bar Career Girls, back in 1997, Hard Truths is considerably shorter than anything Leigh has made post-1990. He’s always been justly proud that his creative independence and diligence ensures each film emerges exactly as he intends it to be seen. But it’s hard to shake a nagging feeling that a few additional scenes might have made for a more fully rounded final cut.

Elsewhere, habitual collaborators deliver familiar pleasures – Gary Yershon’s elegiac score, unobtrusive yet precise framing by the late and much-mourned cinematographer Dick Pope – and the blocking and staging of a crucial Mother’s Day gathering is expertly done. It’s easy to take Leigh’s work for granted, even minor-key projects such as this, but the hardest truth of all is how irreplaceable he still is in British cinema. Very few other contemporary filmmakers in this country are so prepared to confront with care and dignity people who others would cross the road to avoid, and to unpick the wayward threads of their fragile lives. Meantime, Leigh’s work continues.

► Hard Truths is available in UK cinemas from 31 January.