Another Year – THE HOBBLEDEHOY

The Hard Truths of Mike Leigh

October 5, 2024 by THE HOBBLEDEHOY

Fears, trauma, and family relationships come into focus in Mike Leigh’s existential drama, Hard Truths. The film examines the human condition as the characters struggle and survive in a post-pandemic world. Hard Truths will make you laugh and cry, possibly at the same time.

by Gill Pringle

A true original, it’s almost comical to imagine a version of British director Mike Leigh where he went to Hollywood.

Apart from his historical dramas, Leigh’s films have always been celebrations of ordinary British folk with ordinary problems, “kitchen sink dramas” as they have sometimes been called. His latest film, Hard Truths – competing in the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Official Selection – is no different.

Set in London, it explores family relationships in a post-pandemic world — namely, housewife Pansy, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, an unhappy, angry woman. Agoraphobic, hypochondriac and paranoid about animals, birds, insects, plants and flowers, she is confrontational with everyone, especially her plumber husband, Curtley (David Webber) and their stay-at-home unemployed adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).

“You couldn’t make a film like Hard Truths without the most fantastic, brilliant actors. All the actors that I work with are character actors. They’re actors who don’t just play themselves, don’t just perform their own narcissism. They actually are really good and passionate about making characters that are like real people out there in the street,” says the 81-year-old director, who was in feisty form at San Sebastian, the first time he has ever competed at this elegant festival.

Having previously directed Marianne Jean-Baptiste to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role in his 1996 film Secrets & Lies, he says of their latest collaboration, “We develop the character together, but if I started from the premise of the idea of the kind of person that Pansy is, and I found an actress who was like Pansy, it would be a nightmare, and we’d never make the film.

“But the thing is, that Marianne has got a great sense of humour and is a very generous, open, and passionate person who is able to create somebody like Pansy with total accuracy – but she is not Pansy.

Movies to help us through: “Another Year”

January 3, 2023 by THE HOBBLEDEHOY

By Michael Stevenson

The Hobbledehoy never fail to see the latest film from British director Mike Leigh. High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Career Girls, Happy Go Lucky are each wonderful films, but the one we need to help us through the Covid-19 lockdown is 2010’s Another Year.

Why is film necessary viewing during our confinement? I love how the characters in Another Year take care of each other. The script covers four seasons in the life of one British couple, Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and their small group of friends. The couple tends a seasonal garden that requires tender care, as does their challenging friend “Mary” (Lesley Manville) – a deeply troubled narcissist trying to hold onto her youth by pursuing her friend’s much younger son. There is birth, death, disease and always much love throughout.

Leigh’s actors Broadbent (Another Year, Life Is Sweet) Sheen (High Hopes, Vera Drake) and Manville (High Hopes) each give brilliant performances.

Said one reviewer of Another Year: “Ordinary people doing really ordinary things and making these things really important.”

I suppose that’s what we are each doing during this lockdown – making seemingly ordinary things, like staying at home, really important. And caring for each other, even our crazy friends.

Have you seen Another Year ? If so, tell us your thoughts. Have your own film recommendation to help us get through? Tell us.

Watch ANOTHER YEAR on Amazon

Interview with Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville

Bill Antoniou takes a look at the films of British master filmmaker Mike Leigh

July 6, 2020 by THE HOBBLEDEHOY

Whenever people tell me that Mike Leigh is one of their favourite filmmakers, I’m always surprised to hear it. Even though he’s also one of mine, I forget to think of him as an actual filmmaker.

His brilliant work is derived from his achievements in theatre and it bears those origins on screen, though I don’t mean that as criticism. He returns to some character archetypes frequently (the soulful homeless man, the hopelessly chirpy working-class woman) and the conflicts he puts his characters through feel like the stuff of stage drama. He makes them relevant in cinema from the beginning, then as he goes along, directing more films and making his multi-levelled narratives feel more cinematic. (Meantime just feels like watching people, while Another Year plays almost like a thriller.)

A common mistake people make about Leigh’s work is saying that it is improvised. It’s absolutely not, but is rather a script created from work that he does with his actors, creating characters from birth to death and putting them in situations together in which their improvised interactions eventually result in a finished work. In the eighties, he revolutionized the kitchen-sink melodrama. These films were celebrated for nailing the anxieties of the less fortunate under Thatcher’s conservative reign. In the nineties, he applied his observations of simple lives in the less glamorous parts of London to high concept dramas (and in the case of his Palme d’Or-winning Secrets & Lies, created his masterpiece).