Aubrey Malone
A scene from the film Hard Truths
We’re an hour into Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (12A) before a character says to Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), “Why are you so angry?” It’s a question you’re entitled to be asking yourself from the first minute of the film. Leigh doesn’t spoon-feed us with answers to it.
Hurt people hurt people. There’s a suggestion she may have been mistreated by her mother.
I’m always filled with a sense of excitement when I see the words “Written and directed by Mike Leigh” on the credits of a film. Compassion has been seeping from his pens and lens for many moons now.
Hard Truths is no exception. With his customary deft touches, he presents us with a cross-section of people of colour. We get to know them resoundingly well from short vignettes.
Leading them is the vituperative Pansy. She has a tongue like a razor-blade. Suffering her outrageous behaviour (emphasis on the “rage”) is her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and overweight son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).
Curtley has been the brunt of her anger for so long he’s zoned out. Moses stays in his room listening to music, at least when he’s not going on his mysterious walks. Where are they to? I won’t say.
There’s also Pansy’s hairdressing sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) and her two daughters Kayla and Aleisha (Ani Nelson and Sophie Brown). Their sunny dispositions throw Pansy’s sourness into high relief.
So does a doctor, a dentist, and various people from shops. Most of them roll their eyes as she erupts. Some take her on. This makes her worse.
If you were to ask me what Hard Truths was ‘about,’ I would say ‘It’s about 97 minutes long.’ I’m not trying to be clever. One doesn’t go to Mike Leigh films expecting messages or explanations. What he does is present situations. End of.
Most of the cast was unfamiliar to me. Leigh has always worked “off Broadway” with casts of little-known actors – at least until he makes them famous. In his films you always feel you’re watching people from the real world rather than a studio set.
Jean-Baptiste, who first acted for him in Secrets and Lies in 1996, is sensational, capturing a woman so abusive she almost becomes funny at times. We keep wondering if there’s any way through that rock-like personality.
There’s a Mother’s Day scene where her behaviour suggests a catharsis is looming – think Gena Rowlands from A Woman Under the Influence – but Leigh cuts it off in mid-stream. Life doesn’t have such neat resolutions. Why should films?
This is a study of people from Main Street, Anywhere. Though taking place in London, it could equally have been set in Tallaght or Timbuktu. Art is universal. So is suffering.
The ability to see diamonds in the rough is Leigh’s trump card. There’s an aching beauty to the fragile, troubled souls he presents to us.
He’s nearing the end of his career now. Let’s celebrate what’s left of it.