One of IndieWire’s most-anticipated fall film premieres this year, “Hard Truths” reunites beloved (and seven-time Oscar-nominated) director Mike Leigh with actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for his 1996 Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Secrets & Lies.” In “Hard Truths,” out from Bleecker Street for an awards-qualifying run in December after debuting at the Toronto and New York film festivals, Jean-Baptiste plays a woman sick to death of life, and she’ll tell anyone about it who’s willing to listen. Watch the trailer below.
Here’s the official synopsis courtesy of Bleecker Street: “Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since multiple Oscar-nominated ‘Secrets and Lies,’ the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. Meanwhile, her easygoing younger sister, played by Michele Austin (‘Another Year’), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their clashing temperaments — brimming with communal warmth from her salon clients and daughters alike. This expansive film from a master dramatist takes us into the intensities of kinship, duty, and the most enduring of human mysteries: that even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.”
We know British director Leigh’s extraordinary ability to portray complex, on-their-surface-insufferable people already, from his direction of David Thewlis as an intellectual on a sexual, self-destructive bender in 1993’s black comedy “Naked,” to Lesley Manville as a boozing, self-pitying spinster in 2010’s “Another Year.” Leigh reteaming with Jean-Baptiste, who played an optometrist who discovers her birth mother is a working-class white woman in “Secrets & Lies,” is cause for celebration among cinephiles. The English character actress made a huge impression in Peter Strickland’s 2018 giallo-inspired horror triptych “In Fabric” as a bank teller terrorized, literally, by a dress.
“Hard Truths” is Leigh’s first film since his 2018 historical period piece “Peterloo,” about an 1819 English massacre, a huge undertaking released to little noise via Amazon Studios. His latest takes the Oscar-nominated director of “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Vera Drake” back toward smaller-scale character work. His 2014 J. M. W. Turner biopic “Mr. Turner” won Timothy Spall Best Actor at Cannes; even when working in periods like the 19th century, Leigh brings a hard edge to his characters, and doesn’t let them down easy.
Bleecker Street will release “Hard Truths” for an Oscar-qualifying run starting December 6, before the movie goes properly wide in theaters nationwide on January 10. But first, “Hard Truths” will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Watch the trailer below.
