The hard truths of Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s decades-long ‘love fest’ | Canada Voices

There is a certain patina to the squabbling, domestic scenes of English filmmaker Mike Leigh, whose kitchen-sink dramas and sympathetic comedies have both hoisted and catechized the family unit for nearly six decades. Leigh’s cinema is shrewd and hysterical, keyed into the prosaic charm of everyday life through a litter of esteemed oddballs, whether that be the careworn, working-class household in Meantime (1983), an interracial mother and daughter in Secrets & Lies (1996), or Gilbert and Sullivan’s historic antics in Topsy-Turvy (1999).

Leigh cut his teeth in theatre and teleplays about dysfunctional families (Bleak Moments, Hard Labour, Nuts in May), a concentration which has long since carried over to his filmmaking. In his latest movie, Hard Truths, a London family begins to splinter as overbearing matriarch Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) releases her unbridled frustrations onto her husband Curtley (David Webber) and their dejected 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).

Pansy monologues sinuously about dogs wearing coats or pockets on baby clothing; she harangues strangers in shops; the only time she sees her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is to get her hair braided, or so she says. Chantelle acts as the inverse of Pansy’s strife, an affectionate hairdresser with a strong relationship to her two daughters. Jean-Baptiste and Austin collaborated previously on Leigh’s 1993 stage play It’s a Great Big Shame! and Secrets & Lies, a lineage which inspired Leigh’s latest work.

“[Marianne and I] had been talking about doing something for a long time,” as Leigh, who delivers on his reputation as a playful curmudgeon, tells me in an interview. “She is a consummate character actress, someone who can play real people out in the street.”

“It’s a bit of a love fest with the three of us,” adds Jean-Baptiste in the same conversation. “We work quite seamlessly and slot back into a particular way of being.”

In lieu of locking a script prior to a project, Leigh’s mode of direction involves an extended period of improvisational rehearsal based on an unornamented storyline or idea.

“There is nothing as full-bodied, creative, and terrifying as working on a Mike Leigh project,” says Jean-Baptiste. “You get to use all of your imagination in a way that’s not usually required.”

“Filming with [Mike Leigh], you only know what your characters would know and nothing about the scenes which don’t involve you,” she elaborates. “He really trusts the actors, but I’ve come to see how much he trusts the audience as well.”

Upon its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this past fall, Hard Truths was lauded in large part for Leigh’s consideration of the Black British experience and the insistence, as he put it in the festival Q&A, on “not dealing in stereotypes, caricature, or superficiality.” In our conversation, Leigh accentuates the importance of learning from his actors in real time while not treating this method as an anomaly.

“It’s part of the job of the artist to depict the world in all its details,” he explains. “When working with the actors in Hard Truths, who come from a Caribbean-British background, they simply know things I don’t know. This is not a problem, difficulty, or issue.”

The fully fledged nature of these characters is owed also to their turbulent backstories, just barely accessible to the audience, but enough to outline their desperation. For Pansy, this is a nondescript but chronic pain intensified by the death of her mother. “She doesn’t understand where the pain is coming from, so she tries to place it somewhere: her head, back, stomach, teeth,” says Jean-Baptiste of the psychosomatic pangs.

“We never discussed mental, psychological, or medical conditions when we were making it,” adds Leigh, who also notes that many have proclaimed the film to be “post-COVID.” As he puts it, “the pandemic is mentioned one and a half times,” but the emotional matter of the film is ageless by design.

Pansy’s ambiguous condition becomes accessible only through the lens of towering grief, making the film’s slapstick-y first half (which elicits riotous applause in a theatre) later feel sobering. Many of Leigh’s films thaw in this way, finding pockets of humour that inevitably become sinkholes. But the director is uninterested in psychic connections between his own films, and especially Hard Truths.

“Quite a lot of people have said that Hard Truths is the flip-side of Happy-Go-Lucky and Pansy is the reverse of Poppy,” scoffs Leigh. “I think this is basically rubbish, and it would never have occurred to me to make such a spurious connection.” (By contrast, Jean-Baptiste notes that when playing a Leigh character, she first looks to his earlier films to root herself in existing figures.)

In the end, inhabiting Pansy’s psyche was an endeavour marked by mutual curiosity and discipline.

“We had to create her intrusive thoughts, so for a while, she was quite vocal in my head,” says Jean-Baptiste. “I was relieved when we finished and just wanted to hug somebody or laugh without it being tinged with pain. But the critical thing about playing a character like Pansy is loving her, having compassion for her, and not judging her.”

Hard Truths opens Jan. 24 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.