Hard Truths – first-look review | Little White Lies

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Hard Truths – first-look review

08 Sep 2024

Words by Mark Asch

A serious-looking Black woman with braided hair, wearing a green jacket, speaking on a mobile phone.
A serious-looking Black woman with braided hair, wearing a green jacket, speaking on a mobile phone.
Reunit­ing with Mar­i­anne Jean-Bap­tiste, Mike Leigh makes a wel­come return to con­tem­po­rary film­mak­ing with a sear­ing por­trait of a woman on the brink.

Mike Leigh’s last film set in con­tem­po­rary Britain, Anoth­er Year, had its world pre­mière at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val on May 15, 2010, the fifth day of David Cameron’s Prime Min­is­ter­ship. The sub­se­quent decade and a half of Tory Britain – of aus­ter­i­ty, Brex­it, Win­drush, and Gren­fell – yield­ed Mr. Turn­er and Peter­loo, and while the lat­ter film, espe­cial­ly, with its depic­tion of class war­fare made hor­ri­bly lit­er­al, takes the mea­sure of its moment from a 19th-cen­tu­ry van­tage, Hard Truths, now pre­miered a few weeks into the Starmer years, will have to stand as Leigh’s com­pre­hen­sive state­ment on the his­tor­i­cal epoch just end­ed, one in which the social con­tract that under­girds his col­lab­o­ra­tive meth­ods and col­lec­tivist pol­i­tics was thor­ough­ly, per­haps per­ma­nent­ly undermined.

All that has built up in the last 15 years comes pour­ing out in a tor­rent from the mouth of a char­ac­ter Pan­sy (Mar­i­anne Jean-Bap­tiste). Pan­sy is some­thing like the oppo­site of Hap­py-Go-Luckys Pop­py; she’s an amal­gam, writ large, of the small ways in which we’ve all been changed since the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic: haunt­ed by death, bone-weary in her body, sick of her fam­i­ly and mis­trust­ful of strangers, no longer sure how to act in pub­lic, and per­pet­u­al­ly at some­one else’s throat. It could be the way they dress, the way they look, the way they look at her; she picks fights with a sales­girl at the fur­ni­ture show­room, the check­out girl at the super­mar­ket, and the den­tal hygien­ist attempt­ing to clean her teeth, if she’ll sit still with her mouth open for long enough (good luck with that). At the din­ner table, she com­plains about the cheer­ful grin­ning peo­ple” solic­it­ing for char­i­ty out­side the shops (“I can’t stand them”), and spares a word of bit­ter judg­ment for the one­sie a neigh­bor has picked out for her baby (“What’s a baby need pock­ets for?”).

Rid­ing on the adren­a­line of con­fronta­tion, Jean-Bap­tiste gives a hilar­i­ous per­for­mance that becomes har­row­ing when­ev­er you con­sid­er what it would be like to be oppo­site one of Pansy’s rants – or to deliv­er it. She car­ries ten­sion all through her body – Pan­sy, who through­out the movie just wants to get some rest, wakes up scream­ing every sin­gle time she falls asleep, and when she talks on the tele­phone she seems to curl her whole body around it, like a giant clenched fist. She seems to have undi­ag­nosed OCD and ago­ra­pho­bia – she sprays down the sofa and scours it with real rage, and can’t stand the pigeons in the yard, as if she’s afraid of her sanc­tu­ary being sul­lied or pen­e­trat­ed. She hounds her son, a 22-year-old fail­ure to launch (played by Tuwaine Bar­rett; many of Leigh’s char­ac­ters we would now call neu­ro­di­ver­gent,” but this is the first to wear noise-block­ing head­phones and have an avid inter­est in aero­planes), for his lack of ini­tia­tive; she berates her builder hus­band Curt­ley (David Web­ber) for wear­ing shoes in the house, with a con­tempt that, in a styl­ized char­ac­ter­i­za­tion typ­i­cal in Leigh, gives a height­ened and actor­ly edge of con­tempt to the arche­type of the wife and moth­er sick and tired of per­form­ing uncom­pen­sat­ed domes­tic labor.

A half-cen­tu­ry into Leigh’s career as a chron­i­cler of the British under­class, this is his first film with a Black lead – and indeed an almost all-Black ensem­ble, from the aun­ties in Pansy’s sis­ter Chantal’s (Michele Austin) salon, where she lends tart ban­ter and a warm ear to com­plaints about no-good men, to Chantal’s daugh­ters, whose upward mobil­i­ty is com­pli­cat­ed by imposter syn­drome and sub­tle under­min­ing at work. The scene in which Kay­la (Ani Nel­son) gets an ear­ful for pitch­ing coconut-free mois­tur­iz­er is a high­light: the mod­ern lifestyle indus­try is a new venue for Leight to explore female neu­roses and false­ly cheery bour­geois microag­gres­sions, two of his rich­est com­ic subjects.

What a joy it is to be back in Leigh’s Lon­don after such a long absence – to see it from new angles, made acces­si­ble to his lov­ing gaze by a cast of fresh col­lab­o­ra­tors. Because of the way he works with his actors, devel­op­ing their char­ac­ters through exten­sive impro­vi­sa­tions before he writes them into the script, we invari­ably peo­ple first as col­lec­tions of exte­ri­or quirks at which to mar­vel, whose root caus­es we can per­haps guess at as well, if we’re curi­ous and empa­thet­ic enough.

Pansy’s prob­lem is not that she’s a Black woman in a racist world– or not only that. She car­ries that weight dif­fer­ent­ly than, say, Chan­tal does, which is per­haps the dif­fer­ence between being the old­er and the younger daugh­ter of a non­white sin­gle moth­er with a hard life and high expec­ta­tions. Her chron­ic phys­i­cal and exis­ten­tial pain is cul­tur­al­ly and indi­vid­u­al­ly spe­cif­ic, and her mar­riage is a cause as much as a symp­tom: though gen­tle giant Moses is close to non­ver­bal, Curt­ley is sto­ic as well, and whether his silence is sto­icism and endurance, cowed pas­siv­i­ty, a trau­ma response, or even a kind of emo­tion­al pun­ish­ment, it con­tributes to the pro­found lone­li­ness that has Pan­sy thrash­ing around so.

Pan­sy has some­thing of a break­through when she and Chan­tal make a Mother’s Day vis­it to their mum’s grave, fol­lowed by an awk­ward extend­ed-fam­i­ly vis­it to rival the one in Leigh’s High Hopes, albeit the tone is low-key and mourn­ful rather than bit­ter and far­ci­cal. It’s a hinge point in the movie lead­ing to a large­ly silent final move­ment in which the mar­i­tal bat­tle of wills between Pan­sy and Curt­ley, for so long held in equi­lib­ri­um by the con­stant of her anger, begins to shift, for bet­ter or worse. Hard Truths is, like Naked, seem­ing­ly a study of an extreme per­son­al­i­ty and the peo­ple it bounces off as it moves ever for­ward dri­ven by the same gust of momen­tum; only late in the film do you real­ize you’ve actu­al­ly been watch­ing an unfold­ing break­down approach­ing a moment of crisis.

Leigh has said that the best ques­tion he was ever asked at a Q&A was: Is John­ny still alive 24 hours after Naked ends?” In the Q&A fol­low­ing the world pre­mière of Hard Truths, Leigh allowed that this new film ends at a moment cho­sen par­tic­u­lar­ly for its nar­ra­tive ambi­gu­i­ty, for being the moment when the respon­si­bil­i­ty for telling Pansy’s sto­ry could be most sug­ges­tive­ly hand­ed off to the view­er. The chal­lenge, such as it is, of watch­ing a Mike Leigh movie is sim­ply the chal­lenge of being a per­son in the world – the chal­lenge of pay­ing sus­tained atten­tion to oth­ers – and Pan­sy is among his most demand­ing and reward­ing tests.

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