Hard Truths review: Marianne Jean-Baptiste is ferocious and funny in this fearless drama
Hard Truths review: Marianne Jean-Baptiste is ferocious and funny in this fearless drama
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In the middle of another miserable London winter we could all do with a bit of a cheering up. What we all need is a good bit of Mike Leigh, right? Wrong?. Well, right actually. The king of English naturalism – which means miserabalism – the director behind Naked and Secrets & Lies and Meantime, and other ventures into the grim minutiae of failure and disappointments, this man is also, lest we forget, a fine comic director too.
And after the historical sojourns of his last two films – Peterloo and Mr Turner – he has now returned to core territory of portraying ‘ordinary’ lives in the manner of his very best work: hilarious, even as it scars you for life. Hard Truths is a visceral drama centred around a staggering lead performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whose Pansy is up there with the very best curmudgeons on screen.
Pansy is a woman with problems. She spends most of her time cleaning and cooking for her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and her jobless 22-year old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). But she is no meek housewife. She is a dominating presence with a ferocious wit who scares the men around her into silence.
Terrified too are the people she encounters when she leaves the house. In a succession of very funny and horrifying set-pieces, we see Pansy get into fights with a woman at a furniture shop, customers in line at the check-out, a man waiting for a space in a car park, her doctor, her dentist. Pansy is hair-trigger reactive to any perceived slight, which then escalates into full-on war. She has a gift for saying the unsayable, with no filter for strangers any more than for her family.
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