British maestro Mike Leigh’s 23rd feature, Hard Truths, is an intense yet compassionate character study of Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a far from likeable person at first sight. High-strung, easily affected and offended and flaring up at the slightest provocation, she makes things wretched not just for herself but also for everyone around her. Her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and their aimless drifter of a son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) are at the forefront of bearing the brunt of her mercurial ways, relentlessly, almost every single day and hour of their lives. The strangers—fellow shoppers, sales counter managers, doctors and dentists—are just as susceptible to her unpredictable fits of temper.
The only one to exercise a modicum of control and bring ease and peace to Pansy is her hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin). A polar opposite, Chantelle is a sunny, positive, cheerful and immensely amiable single mother with two daughters who are just as bright as her—Kayla (ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown). While Pansy shuns people, Chantelle embraces them and personifies community spirit.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It also screened at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, London Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Jean-Baptiste’s performance has been one of the most widely appreciated in 2024. She got the Best Actress nod for 2024 from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (shared with Mikey Madison, Anora) as well as the National Society of Film Critics, the first woman of colour to have achieved this distinction. She also won the best lead performance award at the British Independent Film Awards and Toronto Film Critics Association.
It was quite fitting for me to have seen the film on Mother’s Day with one of the principal scenes in Hard Truths being all about Chantelle trying to take a hesitant Pansy to their mom Pearl's grave on Mother’s Day to mark her fifth death anniversary. A scene that brings to fore Pansy’s hidden grudges—of being forced into responsibilities as an elder child when her father abandoned them and being neglected at the cost of her sister. It also establishes her inability in processing loss, pain and grief. Despite the span of time, a closure still eludes her.
Hard Truths makes for an endlessly hard watch with a seemingly unfluctuating screenplay (as static as Pansy’s own life) moving from one simmering encounter of hers to another. It doesn’t rely on action but is heavy on the dialogue. In that sense it’s an unhappy slice of a London-based extended working class black family life, a vivid portrayal of not just one feverish mind but the turmoil that her mental health issues throws her entire family into. The psychologically dense portrait of a woman in the breakdown mode is also an incisive probe into the heart and mind of those surrounding her. Dick Pope’s camera is a perfect ally of Leigh in that exercise—intense in its gaze, piercing with the close-up shots.
The film rides on Jean-Baptiste’s deeply felt and wonderfully nuanced performance. The ensemble around her is just as layered. Webber and Barrett as her husband and son are specially chilling in their seeming unresponsiveness—to her and to their own fragile selves. They just keep bearing with her to their own detriment and you wonder when either of them will erupt with all the pent up rage or reach a breaking point.
Even as the film shows the unconscious psychological cruelty and violence underlying the situation, it also tries to understand Pansy’s behavioural patterns with empathy, tenderness, love and care. Leigh doesn’t offer any easy cure for her affliction but, despite her being a bad wife, mother, sister and aunt, he isn’t willing to give up on her as a far from perfect human being. The ties that bind us more often than not transcend the barriers of pain and hurt.