There’s a lot of talk these days around the idea of whether a film should have a “likeable” central character, or how unlikeable one can be before an audience might lose interest in them altogether. However, rarely does a film so unapologetically focus on such a prickly, difficult human being as Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, and do it with such empathy and skill that you feel deeply for them. The veteran British filmmaker, who has long been bringing the cold reality of working-class English life to the screen, returns here with a starring role for the phenomenal Marianne Jean-Baptiste nearly three decades after her turn in his 1996 film Secrets and Lies.
Baptiste is Pansy, a Londoner of Afro-Caribbean descent who lives with her quietly exasperated builder husband (David Webber) and her grown-up son (Tuwaine Barrett), who we presume is neurodivergent. Following Pansy’s daily life cleaning her home, running errands and going out to the shop, we see that her mounting irritability is not the result of one bad day, nor even the approaching anniversary of a bereavement – she is an angry, paranoid person, fearful of the world around her and suspicious of the people in it.
Feeling poorly done by her so-called “ungrateful” family, she is endlessly complaining about their behaviour. Meanwhile, her sunnier sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, also brilliant) is a hairdresser with two daughters, but her attitude toward life is far more open – in spite of the struggles she has faced as a single mum, she tries to help her sister take a more optimistic view of life – to little avail.
What happens, asks Leigh, when a person simply cannot stop themselves from damaging their closest relationships? When their unresolved rage and resentment bubbles forth in endless tirades at innocent shopkeepers and beleaguered relatives; when they glower at everyone they see on the street? And when, worst of all, they know they are doing it, but can’t seem to help it?
There is something political and social in Pansy’s rage: race and class and opportunity and social expectation have all encrusted into hardened layers of frustration. Yet Hard Truths doesn’t wear that on its sleeve.
Pansy sinks further into despair during the course of the film (Photo: Studiocanal)Adrien Brody deserves an Oscar for The Brutalist
Read MoreLeigh doesn’t tell us her backstory in detail. All we know is that Pansy is a housewife and seems to live in relative comfort; the full source of her anguish and anger is for us to guess. But we can start to piece it together. As a visit to the gravesite of Pansy and Chantelle’s late mother approaches, Pansy’s behaviour grows more erratic and frightening, and in some scenes of throat-clutching discomfort, the two sisters attempt to form a meaningful connection before Pansy sinks even further into her despair.
That’s the movie, and that’s the greatness of it: it’s a film about ordinary Londoners living ordinary lives and facing normal challenges, from mental health to domesticity. Baptiste is toweringly real: formidable and heartbreaking in her performance. That she didn’t get an Oscar nomination for the role is a disgrace.
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