Hard Truths
Pansy seems on the verge of a breakthrough, a realisation that might finally allow her some relief, but Leigh isn’t about to allow us any pat dramatic resolution.
Directed by Mike Leigh
Starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber
Opens 31 January 2025
8/10
Way back in the dying days of the Gordon Brown premiership, Mike Leigh introduced us to Poppy, the almost pathologically blithe sprite played by Sally Hawkins who freewheeled through his film Happy Go Lucky. Now, after an extended historical detour, first with Mr Turner (2014) and then the epic Peterloo (2018), he returns to suburban London where we meet Pansy (an imperious Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a character who might be Poppy’s, if not evil, then profoundly damaged, twin.
You might spend a long and fruitless day trying to diagnose just what exactly is grinding Pansy’s gears. She’s exhausted, waking screaming from nightmares every morning. She certainly has OCD, spending every moment obsessing over stray crumbs in the kitchen or even a pigeon lurking in the garden. And she’s in perpetual hair-trigger fight mode, finding an opportunity to pick rows with everyone from the supermarket check-out girl to her long-suffering dental hygienist. Even babies aren’t immune from her teeth-kissing wrath.
We meet her family, quietly treading on eggshells around her - the long-suffering plumber husband, her shiftless, withdrawn son and her hairdresser sister (Michele Austin) and her two wise-cracking daughters. Slowly, over a mother’s day visit to their dead mum’s grave we begin to piece together a backstory: how Pansy as the older sister missed out on a childhood, forced into adult responsibility too soon.
Pansy seems on the verge of a breakthrough, a realisation that might finally allow her some relief, but Leigh isn’t about to allow us any pat dramatic resolution. Instead he leaves you with the lingering thought that maybe Pansy isn’t Poppy’s twin after all, but rather a twisted, estranged sister of Naked’s misanthropic Johnny?
