A SPRING MORNING ON A QUIET STREET IN SUBURBAN North London. Inside an immaculate—indeed, compulsively clean—house, a middle-aged Black woman named Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) wakes up screaming. What was her nightmare? Does she live one? Could she be one? Hard Truths, Mike Leigh’s first film in six years, has a title that lends itself to multiple meanings and a protagonist whose complexity invites them.
Approaching his 82nd birthday, Leigh is not only the finest living British filmmaker but also the most Dickensian. Sensitive to social inequities and somewhat didactic, he is deeply invested in what George Orwell termed Dickens’s “cult of ‘character’”—or, as Leigh would put it, “character actors.” He populates his world, nearly always London, with a vivid assortment of creepy loners, nutty foreigners, sullen slugs, grotesque strivers, sloppy…