35/33
Plot
Legendary director Mike Leigh returns to the modern world with a fierce, compassionate and often darkly humorous examination of family and the thorny bonds that bind us together. Reuniting with Leigh for the first time since the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman tormented by fear, tormented by pain and prone to furious tirades against her husband, her son and anyone who looks at her. Meanwhile, her laid-back younger sister, played by Michele Austin (Another Year), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their conflicting temperaments – filled with the warmth of the salon’s customers and her daughters. This sprawling film from the master playwright draws us into the intensity of kinship, duty and that most enduring of human mysteries: that even through a lifetime of pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.
