It’s Not Just Me
By Matthew Eng
New York Film Festival 2024:
Hard Truths
Dir. Mike Leigh, U.K./Spain, Bleecker Street
Under the cover of blackout curtains, a woman jolts herself awake with a hair-raising shout. She catches her breath, but cannot shake off her ring of panic, the quiver and cold sweat of constant fear. This will be one of the more peaceful moments of her day.
From the beginning of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) exists in a state of agitation. An unhappy homemaker, she spends her waking hours furiously cleaning a coldly immaculate North London abode and berating her adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for his idle and untidy habits. At dinner, she inveighs against charity chuggers, non-English-speaking immigrants, racist police, and canine apparel over the course of a single tirade, barely coming up for air as she browbeats Moses and her husband Curtley (David Webber) into serving as a mute and acquiescent audience. Father and son have become accustomed to the miasma of their matriarch’s rage, which ultimately appears to exhaust no one more than Pansy herself. She cannot help but give noxious expression to the immense noise in her head and the unprocessed, deep-seated pain of which she is proprietor and prisoner.
The first of Leigh’s films led by a Black ensemble, Hard Truths is a searing, unsentimental, and darkly comic study of a full-fledged misanthrope, as well as his feature-length return to modern times after 2011’s Another Year. (He helmed an Olympics-adjacent short in 2012.) More momentously, the film reunites the director with Jean-Baptiste, who first shot to acclaim through her unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance as the introverted and grief-stricken Hortense, the unwavering calm at the center of the storm in Leigh’s Palme d’Or–winner Secrets & Lies (1996). In the director’s latest, Jean-Baptiste is the storm.
Like all of Leigh’s films, Hard Truths took shape during a protracted rehearsal process that began with the assembled actors compiling a list of people known from their own lives whom they could envisage as cinematic characters. From there, each conferred with Leigh to zero in on one of these figures and fleshed them out in workshops with other ensemble members, devising personal and parallel histories of extensive depth and detail; from their improvisations and his own initial outline, Leigh eventually culled together a screenplay. As collaboratively conceived by actress and director, Pansy is among the more vinegary personalities that Leigh has placed at the center of a narrative. In scene after scene of rapidly escalating and frequently hilarious belligerence, Pansy proves herself an offensive, motormouthed horror to doctors, salesclerks, fellow shoppers, and other strangers who have the misfortune of encountering and inevitably being accosted by her on any given day. At home, she keeps Curtley, a man of either superhuman patience or benumbed resignation, and the morose, taciturn Moses at the receiving end of her apoplectic outbursts. There is but one person in Pansy’s life capable of brooking and mitigating her animosity.
In a beloved, outlying scene from Secrets & Lies, Hortense whiles away an afternoon at home with a longtime friend; their dialogue offers both a ruminative, good-humored respite from Hortense’s agonizing search for her white birth mother and the only instance in the film where the character communes with another Black woman. It is thus ineffably moving to witness Michele Austin, Jean-Baptiste’s partner in these scenes, rejoin the actress in Hard Truths. As Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle, a hairdresser and single mother, Austin delivers one of the loveliest supporting turns in Leigh’s corpus, meeting her costar’s high dudgeon with nuanced geniality and a disarming generosity of spirit. For the viewer who carries a vivid memory of the heart-to-heart in Secrets & Lies, it requires little labor from Austin to instantly convince us that Chantelle is the only person in the world capable of understanding her sister. In scene after scene, Austin and Jean-Baptiste expand on an effortless bond only glimpsed in the earlier film, layering it with decades’ worth of resentment, remorse, and unquestioning devotion.
Chantelle’s life comes into focus during Leigh’s trademark detours. Throughout the film, Leigh draws our attention away from Pansy’s quarrels to alight on unexpected incidents in which he captures his secondary characters in pleasingly and painfully mundane moments that occur outside of the eye of his protagonist: Chantelle as she tends to two of her clients at the salon, both single women of a certain age, elegantly enacted by Jo Martin and Llewella Gideon; Curtley as he renovates a house with his garrulous assistant (Jonathan Livingstone); Moses as he embarks on aimless walks around the city; and Chantelle’s convivial, grown-up daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) as they swallow their workplace frustrations and genuinely delight in their mother’s company. (The lived-in warmth of Chantelle’s plant-filled, top-floor apartment is expertly emphasized by production designer Suzie Davis in contrast to the bleak sterility of Pansy’s spacious home, where a banana peel on a kitchen counter throws her into disarray.) Still, Leigh sometimes struggles to balance these personalities, who are precluded from fully probing and ping-ponging off each other like the ensembles of Leigh’s previous domestic dramas. Perhaps a character as outraged and clamorous as Pansy cannot help but upset the narrative balance and occasionally eclipse the contributions of others operating in a quieter vein.
At times, the woolliness of Leigh’s peripheral characterizations betray the truncated nature of this film’s production. The 81-year-old director has spoken in recent weeks of his difficulty finding financiers for his projects after his scalding historical epic Peterloo (2018) was indifferently received by ticket-buyers and the majority of mainstream critics, losing millions for its American distributor, the famously hard-up Amazon. The character-building rehearsals for Hard Truths lasted 14 weeks, a luxury by the standards of the average fiction filmmaker but a significant reduction from Leigh’s preferred timeframe. One imagines that a figure such as Moses, whose sullen and stunted solitude culminates in a dialogue-free scene at Piccadilly Circus that has the feel of a moment pared down and tacked on, might have been further explored if time and money had been on Leigh’s side.
Still, it is hard to lament what could have been when confronted with the galvanic force of Jean-Baptiste in this role. Hard Truths belongs to the actress in the same way that Naked (1993) belongs to David Thewlis or Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) to Sally Hawkins or Secrets & Lies to Brenda Blethyn, who reaped the lion’s share of prizes and plaudits for that film despite her character being on equal footing with Jean-Baptiste’s Hortense. In that film, Blethyn’s nervy and aggressively mannered acting was emblematic of a then-recognizable “Mike Leigh performance,” an idiosyncratic, bigger-than-life style that perennially ties the director’s screen work to his theatrical roots. In contrast, Jean-Baptiste fine-tuned a demure yet multidimensional characterization that was often intriguingly antithetical to Blethyn’s and remains distinct in Leigh’s filmography for eschewing bold strokes in favor of an enigmatic interiority, declining to be legible and therefore known.
Pansy is the type of person who could cause Hortense to abandon a week’s worth of groceries if she ever queued up behind her at Waitrose. It is a testament to Jean-Baptiste’s versatility, deplorably underutilized in the nearly 30 years separating her first collaboration with Leigh from her newest, that the actress magnifies Pansy with a maximalism on a par with Blethyn’s, Thewlis’s, and the late Katrin Cartlidge’s, while rounding out the anxieties, sorrows, and grudges that fuel the character’s indignation. This is a once-in-a-career performance of masterful and intensely dedicated physicality, from the scrunched-up, puckered-lip perma-scowl that suggests a person with gums made of grapefruit to the hunched, restive posture of a veteran fighter who walks through the world wound tighter than piano wire. Throughout, Jean-Baptiste bellows, badgers, bristles, and simmers with an ardency that jolts yet never loses sight of Pansy’s implicit reasons. When she is humbled into silence after a revelatory argument with Chantelle at the gravesite of their demanding mother, the sight of the actress’ enfeebled frame is sincerely worrisome, a flesh-and-blood colossus shrunken to a vessel of despair. It is in this cemetery that Pansy makes her most candid confession: asked by her sister why she is incapable of enjoying life, Pansy blurts out “I don’t know” in a wail that seems to emanate from the gut and take even her by surprise.
In the final act of Hard Truths, Leigh reframes his narrative from the vantage of the forlorn Curtley, played by Webber with distressing, self-contained despondency. In doing so, Leigh presents his protagonist with an ultimatum, an open-ended test of a potentially exhausted compassion. Leigh is far too discerning a filmmaker to definitively diagnose, much less remedy, Pansy’s condition; instead, he grants it an ambiguity that allows it to remain uniquely her own. Through the vitality of Jean-Baptiste’s playing, Pansy’s wrath comes to function as a kind of wayward defiance, a fire-in-the-belly refusal to abide by society’s norms and niceties, but also an anguished, baneful admission that each of our worlds is a hair’s breadth away from collapse. Pansy stares daggers at the stoic and the meek alike and sucks her teeth at them.