A small, hard gem of a film, Hard Truths (the title contains an echo of Mike Leigh’s first feature from 1971, Bleak Moments) is a riveting, sometimes shocking and sometimes funny, look at the psychologically maimed character Pansy. She is played with towering, full-blown rage and a thunderous voice by Mariane Jean-Baptiste, the actress whose star rose 28 years ago as the Black optometrist looking for her birth family in Secrets & Lies. Here, in another dysfunctional family, her concerns are different but she is just as moving. It is a unique role whose emotional power should put Jean-Baptiste on Best Actress shortlists and help launch this beautifully crafted chamber piece with audiences.
Hard Truths was famously rejected by the festivals of Cannes, Venice and Telluride, according to the film’s Wikipedia page, but found its artistic vindication in Toronto’s Special Presentations strand and now in San Sebastian competition, where it has met with strong support from critics and audiences. Its next big stops will be the New York Film Festival, followed by a U.S. release by Bleecker Street.
In contrast to his recent period films like the sprawling Mr. Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018), Hard Truths is a small film marked by confinement. This domestic drama probes the very troubled psyche of an angry, depressed woman whose fears and anxieties about the world inside and outside her home cripple her relationship to her husband Curtley (David Webber) and son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). This Black British family lives in a tidy white frame house on the corner of a residential street and is not struggling with money worries. Middle-aged and lower-middle-class, Pansy spends most of her time cleaning imaginary dirt off the furniture and yelling at the men of the house. Her voice is stentorian and its fury cows them into silent misery. Yet her endless stream of criticism is so outrageous, vituperative and unfair, as well as imaginatively couched, that it soon has the audience laughing out loud like it was a sitcom.
This is the first part of the story, when we are treated to Pansy yapping furiously at her doctor, her dentist, the saleswoman in a sofa showroom, the cashier at a convenience store (a dispute that soon spreads to the other customers in line behind Pansy). In the parking lot, she gets into a verbal fight with another short-triggered maniac who begins to look dangerous, and suddenly one sees how stories about drivers killed over a parking space could play out.
The backstory behind Pansy’s mental fragility is barely broached. Her paranoia and anxieties go unremarked at home, as though Curtley, a plumber, and Moses, who is unemployed at 22 and spends his days wandering aimlessly, had given up on her long ago. The atmosphere at home is horrible.
In contrast, there is the rich and joyous life of her sister Chantelle (Michelle Austin), a hairdresser whose good sense and empathy makes her popular with everyone. Her household is graced by her two well-adjusted daughters (played by Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown), one a trainee lawyer and the other a marketing assistant, who are shown encountering their first career obstacles in frustrating rebuffs and demands from their bosses. (This is the only place where racial discrimination may come into play, unlike Secrets & Lies where it was the whole story. Perhaps a reminder than Britain may have changed but still has a long way to go?) Yet these young Black women don’t give up and the implication is, they have the stuff to make it in their professions. Then why can’t Aunt Pansy be reasonable and find her place in society?
As the story unfolds, perceptions of Pansy begin to shift. The key scene is a visit to the cemetery with Chantelle to put flowers on their mother’s grave – it’s the fifth anniversary of her death. As usual, Pansy is foaming at the mouth with bile, hurling insults at the dead woman that Chantelle cannot accept. Then something happens to Pansy as she remembers (true or false?) that mother loved her sister best. In fact, “everyone hates me”, she says before lapsing into a deep, morose silence that is almost worse than her insults. Later, a small act on the part of Moses, coming out of nowhere, touches her profoundly; it is followed by a repulsive act of childish revenge by the passive-aggressive Curtley. But he will soon be forced to come to grips with his wife.
There is no great catharsis scene at the end, another rule of the genre that Hard Truths breaks. On the contrary, the critical final shots deliberately leave the audience in limbo with a totally open ending, where it is uncertain what Pansy will decide to do and whether one course of action is psychologically or morally superior to another. Not all viewers will enjoy being left holding the pen and asked to write their own ending. But in another way it makes sense to deepen audience involvement in the critical final scene, and the abruptly closed curtain feels modern and fresh.
The English-Spanish coprod was originally scheduled to film in the Covid years, and its story still carries a sense of physical confinement in Suzie Davies’ production design that emphasizes the smallness of rooms and closets, the narrowness of stairs and the limits of fenced-in yards. The cemetery is the only truly open space in the film, which D.P. Dick Pope’s camera roves over in relieved abandon. Leigh’s regular musical composer Gary Yershon is also on hand, echoing Pansy’s feeling of loneliness with a bouquet of melancholy compositions for single instruments.
Director, screenplay: Mike Leigh
Cast: Mariane Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Tuwaine Barrett, Bryony Miller
Producer: Georgina Lowe
Coproducers: Henry Woolley, Laura Fernandez Espeso
Cinematography: Dick Pope
Editing: Tania Reddin
Production design: Suzie Davies
Costume design: Jacqueline Durran
Music: Gary Yershon
Sound: Tim Fraser
Production companies: The MediaPro Studio (Spain), Film4 (UK), Thin Man Films (UK) in association with Creativity Media
World Sales: Cornerstone Films (UK)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In English
97 minutes
