Author: Louis Bayman, Associate Professor in Department of Film Studies, University of Southampton

If you were to ask a computer programme to come up with a title for a new Mike Leigh film it could do no better than Hard Truths. Echoing the title of his very first film in 1971, Bleak Moments, Hard Truths represents a variation on the veteran British director’s recurrent theme of the delusions that keep us a step away from despair. With a long production initially delayed by lockdown, Hard Truths is also Leigh’s return to a contemporary domestic setting after the historical dramas Mr Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018). The film centres on Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a…