Melissa Anderson
Misery’s company: Mike Leigh’s engrossing new film is a brilliant study of two diametrically opposed sisters.
Ani Nelson as Kayla, Michele Austin as Chantelle, Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy, David Webber as Curtley, Sophia Brown as Aleisha, and Tuwaine Barrett as Moses in Hard Truths. Courtesy Simon Mein. © Thin Man Films.
Hard Truths, written and directed by Mike Leigh, playing at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City, through December 12, 2024,
opens nationwide January 10, 2025
• • •
One of the abiding themes in the work of Mike Leigh is the attainment of happiness—or, if not happiness, exactly, at least satisfaction, a sense of purpose, the resilience to withstand the frustrations and disappointments that life metes out daily, particularly as the result of the pitiless class hierarchy in his native UK. Why are some able to optimistically look ahead, to shake off the rebuff or unpleasant encounter, but others completely consumed by their misery, their lives an endless inventory of grievances and humiliations? Why, for example, is Poppy (Sally Hawkins), the schoolteacher protagonist in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), indefatigably cheerful while Scott (Eddie Marsan), her driving instructor, is unrelentingly enraged? This question takes on greater salience when it’s applied to those who share DNA, as with the twentysomething twins in Life Is Sweet (1990), both of whom still live at home with their parents: Natalie (Claire Skinner) takes great satisfaction in her work as a plumber and looks forward to her upcoming holiday in the US, yet unemployed, bulimic Nicola (Jane Horrocks), a sneering bundle of neurotic tics and condescending sloganeering, rarely leaves her room.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy and Michele Austin as Chantelle in Hard Truths. Courtesy Simon Mein. © Thin Man Films.
Two other sisters—one vexed and vituperative, the other warm and compassionate—form the key dynamic in the engrossing Hard Truths, Leigh’s return to current-day dramas after his nineteenth-century historical productions Mr. Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018). His latest also reteams the filmmaker with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who played Hortense, an emotionally stable, contentedly unattached optometrist who seeks out her birth mother in Secrets and Lies (1996), and here stars as Pansy, whose surly temperament is the exact opposite of Hortense’s. Pansy stands in even sharper contrast with her single younger sibling, Chantelle (Michele Austin), eternally at ease and jovial, no matter the setting: attentively listening to her clients at her hair salon or clowning with her two young-adult daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophie Brown), at the flat they all live in.
Hard Truths also serves as a reunion for Jean-Baptiste and Austin, who shared a brief but potent sequence in Secrets and Lies as two dear friends who have a wide-ranging discussion touching on grief, sex, and filial responsibilities and aggravations. (In the ’96 film, they play women who were raised by parents who left the West Indies for the UK; Hard Truths is the first Leigh film to focus almost exclusively on characters from the British Black Caribbean community.) In only five minutes of screen time in the earlier movie, the actresses beautifully conveyed the nuances of a long-standing close relationship. Their lengthier scenes together in Hard Truths showcase them burrowing more deeply into tenser psychic terrain: comparing childhood memories, remonstrating and then consoling, judging and trying to accept each other.
David Webber as Curtley, Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy, and Tuwaine Barrett as Moses in Hard Truths. Courtesy Simon Mein. © Thin Man Films.
Only Chantelle seems to have found a way to laugh off Pansy’s splenetic outbursts, to not take the bait; Pansy’s husband, Curtley (David Webber), an independent tradesman, and their jobless twenty-two-year-old son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), on the other hand, appear to have been permanently ground down by her fathomless fury. Contrary to its title, Hard Truths offers no simple answers or concrete facts to “explain” the etiology of Pansy’s ire. (A paradox: despite their intricate dialogue and brilliant performances—from actors who, per Leigh’s signature working method, extensively collaborate with the filmmaker to build the strata of their characters—his movies often have the most banal names.) Possible causes, revealed in the course of conversation, are hinted at—during a visit to their mother’s grave, Pansy bemoans that Chantelle was always Mum’s favorite—and are dropped just as quickly. Pansy is not to be solved but witnessed.
When Pansy is not spewing out lava flows of rage, she sleeps, often during the day, her wrath and fatigue classic signs of depression (a word never uttered in the film). But slumber provides no respite from her agony: she stirs from her naps gasping and screaming. She has innumerable phobias (of plants, insects, elevators) and maladies (migraine, stiff jaw, upset stomach). Unemployed, Pansy devotes her waking hours to obsessive cleaning. Susan Sontag once defined depression as “melancholy minus its charms.” Unquestionably, Pansy repels. But her bilious tirades are often hilarious. Shopping for furniture, she upbraids a couple trying out a new couch: “Gyratin’ all over the place, perspirin’ in the cushions!” She insults a young doctor, a fill-in for her usual primary-care physician, as “a mouse with glasses squeaking at me.” During dinner at home with Curtley and Moses, Pansy’s aria of choler spares not even an infant’s outfit: “What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s it gonna keep in its pocket? A knife?”
Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy in Hard Truths. Courtesy Simon Mein. © Thin Man Films.
While Pansy may be the negative force field around which the other characters orbit, each member of the supporting cast is depicted in their own private realm, whether at work or at leisure, far removed from her lacerating tongue. Among the many pleasures of Hard Truths—a film propelled by its protagonist’s anhedonia—are the scenes that, however fleeting, communicate sharp details about how the children of Pansy and Chantelle are navigating quarter life. Both Kayla and Aleisha are shown encountering various levels of reproach from higher-ups at their respective offices (the former works for a skincare company, the latter at a law firm), quotidian abasements that each responds to differently but that neither is undone by. Moses seems the most hopeless, retreating to his bedroom to leaf through The Big Book of Planes and eat PBJs, yet his ambling solo constitutionals through his North London neighborhood suggest, at the bare minimum, a curiosity about his environment outside his cocoon.
Whereas his mother experiences the world, both inside and outside her house, with crippling fear—a terror she assuages by preemptively lashing out. But Pansy’s dudgeon is not inexhaustible. In a rare moment of vulnerability, she tells Chantelle she’s convinced that everyone hates her. Her sister assures her this is not so, adding, “I don’t understand you. But I love you.” Chantelle’s response may be the kindest remark one could ever offer to such a profoundly dejected, impossible person. They are consoling words, but Leigh’s acutely observed film is not meant to soothe. No one understands Pansy less than Pansy herself.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.