Written and directed by Mike Leigh
Almost thirty years ago, Mike Leigh made Secrets & Lies, an excellent drama about thorny family dynamics. Now, he reunites with Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin in Hard Truths, an equally potent look at hurt people hurting those around them.
By god, the anger. Jean-Baptiste is Pansy, a homemaker who trembles with resentment and no one is spared: Not her husband, Curtley, who suffers Pansy’s tirades with a stone-faced expression; not her son Moses, a 22-year old still living at home browbeaten by his mother into downcast silence; not retail workers, cashiers, dentists, a man in a parking lot, doctors, and charity workers. All suffer lashings from Pansy’s wicked tongue, which never tires. What gives?
While Curtley works all day as a self-employed plumber, Moses takes walks (“Whereto?” people demand of him, but would you stay in the house all day with Pansy?), and Pansy stays in, watching her shows or gazing out into the small garden she had tall fences erected around, topped with spikes so that no life may enter.
Michele Austin plays Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle, a divorced hairdresser with two grown daughters. Dispensing advice and joking with her clientele, her home life is equally content, laughing with her daughters in a home that radiates trust and love.
The anniversary of the death of Chantelle and Pansy’s mother is coming up. Chantelle knows her sister, knows what she’s like, yet she insists they make a trip to the cemetery and afterwards bring their families together for a meal. Pansy resists, but Chantelle persists. Trapped in your own headspace and routine, it’s easy to think it’s the norm. In coming together, all involved are in for an awakening.
Hard Truths is a blistering watch, due in large part to Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s nuclear performance where she doesn’t open her mouth unless it’s to berate, insult, complain, moan, lament, accuse, or excoriate.
It’s staggering to watch, and you move from bemused laughter at this incessant outpouring of bile to a stunned silence as you spend more time with Pansy. Observing someone so irate at everything is amusing at arm’s length, but Jean-Baptiste draws you in, against your will, before she reveals the hidden layers beneath and the anguish and torment that fuel this meltdown. Shock and awe acting.
Her supernova rightly takes up a lot of focus, but around Jean-Baptiste, equally impressive performances abound. As Curtley, David Webber works in silence, letting entire conversations spill out from behind his eyes so that you forget he’s not even talking. It’s Austin’s work as Chantelle that makes Hard Truths real, however, as Chantelle provides a portrayal of a brightminded person who makes a conscious decision to live that way, despite the things that plague her. A true human encounter on the big screen and a warm embrace to seal it.
Leigh is of course at the helm of these fine performances, knowing when to let his actors stun you with dialogue or stun you with silent close-ups where emotions can really make a storytelling medium out of a face. The excellence persists right down the line, however, with even small bit characters entering Hard Truth with such striking chemistry you’d be content to be a fly on the wall of Chantelle’s hair salon.
It makes you want to tear your hair out watching whatever else is on offer at your local theatre, because Hard Truths makes everything else feel overblown and stilted in comparison. Is it the writing, the directing, the acting? A combination? It really is an art rather than a science, and fact remains that Leigh’s movie is like spring water when all you’ve been served is pop, as this story of estranged family members has the ability to make you laugh, make you cry, make you gasp, and bring into question ourselves and our relationship to life, those we love within it, and ourselves.
Mikkel Frederiksen 