When I started to become serious with my film watching after 2007, Mike Leigh was one of the directors who caught my early attention. The first one of Leigh’s films I watched was Secrets andLies (1996), soon followed by films like Naked (1993), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All or Nothing (2002) and Vera Drake (2004), as well as his earlier TV-work like Abigail’s Party (1977) and Meantime (1983). It opened the whole genre of British social realism for me. Since then, if only possible, I will not miss a new film by directors like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Andrea Arnold, Lynn Ramsey and Clio Barnard.

Hard Truths had its première in September 2024 at the Toronto Film Festival and has been rolling out in cinemas around the globe during Spring 2025. The story plays in London and follows the life of a black woman Pansy, who is depressed, stressed and constantly angry. She expresses this in a general distaste of people, wherever she goes. She lives with her restrained plumber husband Curley and her passive son Moses, both who just try to stay silent and aloof when she lashes out about anything.

Pansy has a sister, Chantelle, who is a hairdresser and something of an opposite to her with her joy and caring attitude. She asks Pansy early in the film “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Chantelle has two adult daughters, whom she laughs and cries together with and warmly relates to. Whenever she can she tries to pull Pansy and her family into that fellowship.

It’s a harsh film, nothing being fixed, coming together or getting its final explanation. Chantelle tells Pansy towards the end: “I don’t understand you, but I love you.” Through these words we are offered the mature wisdom of a man who has explored throughout his long career the inner life of people who have grown up in dire circumstances, asking from us empathy and compassion. 

Pansy is formidably played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who also was the protagonist of Leigh’s 1992 film Secrets and Lies. I was so impressed by her acting that I had to rewatch Secrets and Lies, in which she plays a very different character. There she is a successful ophthalmologist who after the death of her adoptive mother seeks contact with her biological mother, who is white. Overcoming the mother’s unwillingness to meet her, she enters a family which is virtually destroyed by secrets and lies. She becomes the catalyst for change that the family so deeply needs.

For me, it completed the picture of a film director, whose career is committed to showing us that we live in a world full of darkness and pain that does not need to be the last word. Everywhere, in the most unexpected ways, generosity and togetherness can tear down walls and relational stalemates. It requires someone who chooses to love, even without understanding.

Rinus Baljeu, July 2025

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