Hard Truths
Mike Leigh (2024)
Mike Leigh, eighty-one now, is such a fixture of British cinema that I’d lost sight of how long it’s been since his last feature, Peterloo (2018), and of how relatively few films he’s made over the last decade or so. It’s true that Hard Truths, showing at the London Film Festival, should have been completed sooner than it was. Scheduled for a summer 2020 shoot, the production was postponed by the pandemic; filming eventually got underway in 2023. But Leigh, who wrote and directed five features in the course of 1990s, had been scaling down well before then. There were, working backwards, four-year intervals between Peterloo and Mr Turner, and between Mr Turner and Another Year – the last Leigh picture before Hard Truths with a contemporary setting. In this new work, he renews a collaboration that goes back much further in his filmography: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who came to prominence in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996), has the lead role.
Hard Truths is a companion piece/counterpoint to Another Year’s immediate predecessor, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008): this mask-of-tragedy drama should really be called ‘Mad as Hell’ or, to take account of its angry protagonist’s rarer moments of silent gloom, ‘Miserable as Sin’. In Happy-Go-Lucky, Sally Hawkins played the well-named Poppy. The floral name of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character in Hard Truths, Pansy, is almost comically unsuitable (unless you bear Ophelia in mind – ‘pansies … that’s for thoughts’). Pansy, who lives in a pleasant house in a London suburb, has it in for everyone, verbally at least. For her husband, Curtley (David Webber), who runs a plumbing business. For the couple’s grown-up son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), their only child, who still lives at home, plays video games, goes for walks but hasn’t got a job. Pansy’s sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), is a hairdresser; when she does Pansy’s hair (for free), her elder sister tells her off for brushing too hard. Pansy has a go at people in the queue at the supermarket checkout, at the girl on the till there, at a salesperson in a furniture store. Her anger is thoroughly egalitarian: she berates a GP and a dentist, too.
As in Happy-Go-Lucky, the main character’s immutable mood is a given, unexplained until, about halfway through Hard Truths, Chantelle interrupts one of Pansy’s rants to ask why she’s so angry. It’s Mother’s Day and the sisters are visiting their mother’s grave although Pansy has come along unwillingly and takes the opportunity to complain how the departed gave Chantelle preferential treatment. Pansy’s immediate answer to Chantelle’s question is that she doesn’t know why she’s angry but she does say she’s also scared and tired of life – that she wants it all to end. Leigh has already illustrated both those things. At home, Pansy fulminates about insects on her house plants, a fox in the back garden; she’s frightened of birds getting in and suspicious of the neighbours. After doing housework or even just watching daytime TV for a bit, she’ll take to her bed. When Curtley disturbs her to ask about the evening meal, his wife rages at him before sticking her head back under the bedclothes.
Hard Truths was conceived pre-COVID but the face mask that anxious Pansy sometimes wears outside brings it bang up to date. In another, more important respect, the film isn’t so credible. In today’s world of ubiquitous our-staff-deserve-to-be-treated-with-respect reminders, someone like Pansy would be locked up. Except for an exasperated man (Gary Beadle) with whom she has an altercation in a car park, the victims of her abusive invective put up with too much. Her visit to a doctor’s surgery, particularly striking in this respect, hints at a larger issue. Pansy demands to know why she’s not seeing her usual GP; she can’t argue much with the news that he’s in Israel for a family funeral but then proceeds to take it out on the young female doctor (uncredited on IMDb) that she’s seeing instead – Pansy chides her for going through the motions, for lacking compassion. The doctor keeps her cool but the patient’s behaviour is so disturbed that it’s surprising the GP doesn’t suggest counselling. Of course Pansy would rubbish the idea but it would have been good to hear in what terms. Later, counselling seems about to be raised when Chantelle sympathetically tells her sister things can’t go on as they are but it turns out she means Pansy can’t continue in her unhappy marriage.
Watching Mike Leigh’s work, you sometimes wonder if more emerges about the characters’ background in the preparatory work that he does with his cast than in the finished film. For most of the people in Hard Truths, the film sketches in context but leaves it at that. Chantelle is a single mother of two daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Wilson), and they’re a happy family unit. Both daughters have decent jobs, one in a firm of lawyers, the other in a beauty products company. There are good, sometimes funny introductory scenes of the trio at home together and in their respective workplaces. The latter, because they’re not returned to, come to feel like a narrative makeweight, though; the same goes for one of the sequences of Curtley at work with his plumber’s mate, Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone). Although Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character’s ethnicity was important in Secrets & Lies, we were shown little of the Black social community she was part of: Hard Truths is a significant development for Leigh in that all the main characters are Black. Yet the overwhelming focus on Pansy turns the film into a single character study at the expense of a fuller portrait of a Black British family. This is frustrating when all the actors concerned are good and Leigh prepares the ground so well for exploring more lives than Pansy’s.
There is another episode, and a pivotal one, at Chantelle’s home. On Mother’s Day, she invites Pansy, Curtley and Moses for lunch at her flat. The men arrive separately from Pansy, who returns to the flat with Chantelle after their cemetery visit. Aleisha and Kayla welcome their uncle and cousin. Curtley greets the girls warmly and is enjoying his lunch until Chantelle asks him about his mother, and he clams up. This hasn’t too strong an impact at the time – Curtley’s unexpected silence is soon eclipsed by his wife’s alarming behaviour – but once they’re back home it’s used by Pansy as a stick to beat her husband with. We’re given no idea what’s at the root of Curtley’s change of mood: it seems to be required simply in order to work up the marital crisis that moves to centre stage as soon as Chantelle has told Pansy she should leave Curtley. The couple are now both provocative. Curtley chucks away the bunch of flowers Moses has given Pansy for Mother’s Day (after she moaned she wouldn’t, as usual, get anything from him). She throws Curtley’s clothes out of a wardrobe onto the landing, telling him to sleep downstairs. When he goes off to work next day it seems the marriage really may be on its last legs but the morning’s events stop this sudden momentum in its tracks.
Curtley injures his back, dragging a bath down a flight of stairs with Virgil. He manages to get in his van and back home; his mate goes to find Pansy; she is asleep, startled by the intruder in her bedroom and gives the hapless Virgil what for until he can explain the situation. In the closing scene Curtley is on a chair downstairs, almost literally unable to move, and Pansy sits equally motionless in the bedroom – perhaps considering what to do next but staring into space. These final images of separation and stasis are undeniably powerful; the story’s lack of resolution does make sense. Even so, it’s hard not to suspect that it also masks weaknesses, particularly the underdevelopment of Curtley as a character (at least in what Leigh has put on screen).
Marianne Jean-Baptiste is fascinating. For the most part, she speaks loudly and emphatically, her speech rhythms unvarying. You may find yourself questioning whether the vocal power is right when Pansy is evidently depressed. It’s not until she first stops talking and Jean-Baptiste’s face conveys the depth of her misery that I was persuaded by the performance in purely realistic terms. At the family gathering in Chantelle’s flat, Pansy uncharacteristically laughs then breaks down in sobs: a laughing jag that turns into a crying jag is hardly a screen novelty but Jean-Baptiste’s version is a tour de force. When Chantelle asks why she married Curtley in the first place, Pansy replies that she didn’t want to be lonely – an explanation that, as delivered by Jean-Baptiste, is painfully and completely convincing. By the end of the film, I’d come to realise this performance isn’t just about realism – and wouldn’t be so emotionally powerful if it were more nuanced. The relentless vocals express Pansy’s sense of being trapped. They also serve to convey, from others’ point of view, how impossible she is to live with.
Although Michele Austin has worked mostly in television, this is her fourth Leigh film. Her appearance as Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s friend in Secrets & Lies was followed by other small roles in All or Nothing (2002) and Another Year. She shines as Chantelle, who combines warmth, common sense and exasperation. Austin doesn’t stint on any of these: she relieves the film’s grimness but her playing always feels truthful. The same goes, in a simpler, more light-hearted vein, for Sophia Brown and Ani Wilson as Chantelle’s daughters. David Webber does as well as can be expected with his unsatisfactory role. The opacity of Tuwaine Barrett’s obese, diffident Moses – hard to tell if he’s meant to be on the autistic spectrum – is less frustrating than Curtley’s because the son is a relatively minor character. Leigh gives Moses a gently upbeat ending which, although it seems contrived, is something of a relief, given the young man’s abjectness. We’ve seen Moses on a previous walk being jeered at by a group of kids. On his last outing, he sits on the steps of a building, one of a crowd enjoying the sunshine; a young woman offers him a sweet, which Moses tentatively accepts. The white characters are mostly in the film just to be on the receiving end of Pansy’s choleric missile attacks. The exception is Samantha Spiro, in a cameo caricature as Kayla’s fluently phony boss in the beauty business.
A few days after I saw Hard Truths, Dick Pope, Leigh’s regular cinematographer, died at the age of seventy-seven. His lighting of Mr Turner may have been Pope’s finest achievement but he often brought visual variety to the physical settings of a Leigh film, even when the drama itself rarely changed mood: Hard Truths is a good example. Gary Yershon’s strings score is more definitely melancholy but pleasing. Despite its flaws, this film makes for gripping viewing throughout – like no other new film that I saw at this year’s LFF. Next to tumid Blitz and protracted Anora, Hard Truths stands out in another way. It’s not long enough – the ninety-seven minutes fly by.
16 October 2024