Hard Truths (2024)
Director: Mike Leigh Run Time: 97 min. Rating: R Release Year: 2024
Starring: David Webber, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, Sophia Brown, Tuwaine Barrett
Country: United Kingdom, Spain
Language: English
About the film: World Premiere, 2024 Toronto International Film Festival
Directed by Mike Leigh. Pansy is a woman tormented by anger and depression, hypersensitive to the slightest possible offense and ever ready to fly off the handle. She criticizes her husband and their adult son so relentlessly that neither bothers to argue with her. She picks fights with strangers and sales clerks and enumerates the world’s countless flaws to anyone who will listen, especially her cheerful sister Chantelle, who, despite their clashing temperaments, might be the only person still capable of sympathizing with her.
About the filmmaker:
The great prickly humanist of British cinema, Mike Leigh has forged a body of work unique in its concern for the struggles of ordinary people and the social fabric of working-class London. Famously born from a process of extensive improvisation with his powerhouse actors, Leigh’s films inhabit a register of tragicomic despair that, thanks to their unwavering compassion, never slips into miserabilism. From his early slice-of-life portraits of Thatcher-era Britain (Meantime (1983), High Hopes (1988) to his award-winning international triumphs (Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), Leigh plumbs the darkest depths of the human condition without ever losing hope.
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