There’s no plot, but this British drama pulsates with warmth and humanity: BRIAN VINER reviews Hard Truths

Hard Truths (12, 97mins) 

Verdict: Leigh back on form 

Rating:

Mike Leigh’s mighty reputation as a filmmaker was built by gritty contemporary realism, and after a pair of pictures of contrasting merit set in the 19th century – 2014’s captivatingly brilliant Mr Turner and the lumpen, hugely disappointing Peterloo (2018) – he returns to more familiar pastures with Hard Truths.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, working with Leigh for the first time since Secrets & Lies bagged her an Oscar nomination almost 30 years ago, is unlucky not to have another one for her intense and extraordinary performance as Pansy, a deeply unhappy, acid-tongued woman in the grip of what appears to be severe depression.

That quick synopsis might not propel you to your cinema seat with a spring in your step and a bag of Revels, I grant you. You might even prefer to do something that sounds more fun, like staying at home to clean the oven.

But as ever with Leigh’s best work – and this certainly qualifies – Hard Truths pulsates with humanity. There is warmth and humour rubbing shoulders with the wretchedness.

Moreover, it is enlightening. We have an acquaintance very much like Pansy, and always regarded her as thoroughly unpleasant, one of life’s irredeemable misanthropes. It hadn’t occurred to me until watching this absorbing film that she is more than likely horribly depressed.

Pansy lives in a respectable suburban semi, somewhere in London, with her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber, and their aimless, overweight only son, 22-year-old Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). 

She is permanently furious with them and with the world at large. They in turn are incommunicative and taciturn. Whether their sullen introversion is a cause or a consequence of her misery, manifest also in anxiety and phobias, is never clear. Perhaps a little of both.

The film, crafted in Leigh’s favoured way of intensive workshopping, with the actors encouraged to build the characters themselves, lacks anything that resembles an actual plot. 

Rather, it is a gripping, episodic study of an extended black British family, which sometimes switches its focus to Pansy’s hairdresser sister Chantelle, as sunny as Pansy is sorrowful and beautifully played by Michele Austin (who was also in Secrets & Lies), and her two bright, highly engaging grown-up daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown).

Occasionally, we get clues to Pansy’s past. On Mother’s Day, very grudgingly, she goes with Chantelle to visit their mother’s grave, where old resentments spill out and their conversation sheds further light on her gloomy marriage. But the film is at its best (and oddly, funniest) when the savagely witty Pansy is out and about venting her splenetic rage: visiting the doctor, the dentist, in a check-out queue at the supermarket, in a car park.

I’ve seen Hard Truths twice now, and the first time I wondered whether Jean-Baptiste maybe overdoes it a little. 

But on second viewing, and with that acquaintance of ours in mind, I can appreciate what a superb performance it is, at the heart of a truly excellent film. Leigh will turn 82 next month. Happily, it is not too old for a blistering return to form.

 Saturday Night (15, 109mins)

Verdict: Feverish drama 

Rating:

Chevy Chase turns 82 this year, too. Of the main originals who in October 1975 took part in the opening broadcast of NBC’s comedy show Saturday Night, later re-titled Saturday Night Live, he is one of the few still alive. 

So it must have been a blow when Chase reportedly told Jason Reitman, whose movie Saturday Night fictionalises the frantic lead-up to that inaugural show, that he should be ’embarrassed’ by it.

Well, I enjoyed it. Unfolding more or less in real time, the film chronicles the hours before transmission, with chaos all around, lights crashing down, a neurotic Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) fretting about his material, a fight between Chase (Cory Michael Smith) and co-star John Belushi (Matt Wood), and producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) wondering if he’ll have a career left by Sunday morning.

With SNL, as it is now known, having become a revered institution, Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan present that first show as a seismic moment in US TV history, using sneering old-timers like Johnny Carson (Jeff Witzke) and Milton Berle (played by JK Simmons as a sex predator) to emphasise an evolutionary shift. 

Maybe you couldn’t give any more hoots about this than a US audience might about the first night of The Two Ronnies, which is fair enough. But for anyone with more than a passing interest in SNL, it’s worth a look.

All films are in cinemas now.

Also showing

The Apartment (PG, 125mins) 

Rating:

The 1960 classic The Apartment is getting a welcome re-release to mark the centenary of Jack Lemmon’s birth next week, and if you’re familiar with the film you will enjoy the curious factual nugget that Lemmon was born in a lift.

For it is a lift (or if we must, an elevator) attendant, Fran Kubelik, played by Shirley MacLaine at her loveliest, for whom Lemmon’s character falls, hard, in Billy Wilder’s glorious romantic comedy. Lemmon plays

CC Baxter, an insurance company clerk who curries favour with senior colleagues by letting them use his apartment in midtown Manhattan for sexual ‘assignations’. 

But a complex situation becomes intolerable when he finds that his boss, Mr Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), is having an affair with none other than sweet Miss Kubelik. 

The screenplay by Wilder and IAL Diamond is as fresh and sparkling now as it ever was, so if you’ve never seen The Apartment on a big screen – or perish the thought, at all – treat yourself. It’s an absolute joy.

Companion (15, 97mins)

Rating:

 Companion starts like a romantic comedy, too, as Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) meet over some falling oranges in a supermarket aisle. Indeed, Quaid seems to have his mother Meg Ryan’s gift for rom-com. 

But once the couple arrive at a remote lake house owned by a Russian tycoon (Rupert Friend), it emerges that Iris is a ‘companion robot’, bought by Josh mainly for sexual purposes.

From there the film quickly mutates into a combination of thriller, horror and sci-fi, skilfully handled by writer-director Drew Hancock. 

Its twists and turns would have seemed outlandish not many years ago. Now, in this AI age, it could almost be a documentary.