12/40

Scenario

Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world with a fierce, compassionate and often darkly humorous study of family and the delicate bonds that bind us. Reunited with Leigh for the first time since the multiple Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the amazing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked with anxiety, wracked with grief and prone to angry tirades against her husband, her son and anyone who looks her way. Her carefree younger sister, played by Michele Austin (“Another Year”), is a single mother whose life is as different from Pansy’s as their contrasting temperaments — and brimming with the communal warmth of her salon clients and her daughters alike. This sweeping film from a master playwright takes us into the intensity of kinship, duty, and that most enduring human mystery: that even in lifetimes filled with pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.