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Thank the Cinema Gods, Mike Leigh Is Back
Hard Truths might be his funniest film in a long time, but as always, it’s the kind of laughter that comes with unnerving inevitabilities.
So, when we see Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the middle-aged protagonist of Mike Leigh ’s marvelous Hard Truths, startle herself awake in the film’s opening scenes, we figure she too has been having a bad dream. At times Hard Truths also plays like the opposite number to Leigh’s 2008 comedy Happy Go Lucky, which featured Sally Hawkins as a relentlessly upbeat and friendly woman whose positivity ran at odds with the world around her. There is at least one masterpiece among his period pieces(that would be 1999’s Topsy-Turvy), but his creative process does seem best suited for the present day: Leigh generally begins with an idea, a setting, or a situation, and then works with his actors to build their characters through exhaustive research and improvisation, eventually spinning the films’ stories up as they go along.
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