Six years ago, Mike Leigh produced his first war film, Peterloo, in which domestic unrest in 1819 led British troops to slaughter protesting civilians. At first glance, Hard Truths couldn’t be any more different. It’s an almost surgical dissection of familial misery, unfolding in environments as antiseptic as Peterloo’s were mud-caked and grimy. But like Peterloo, Hard Truths is about a crisis in society and in democracy, the shrinking of the free subject who can insist on their personhood as a matter of course. In the contemporary world of Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and her family, one braces oneself for daily assaults on one’s dignity, some of which never actually come. Each of us is so relentlessly dehumanized by a reductive, transactional world-system that, given the choice, we’d rather be the aggressor than the victim.
Pansy is a deeply unpleasant person, so much so that at times it beggars belief. The first half of Hard Truths is so extravagantly vitriolic that it keeps the viewer perplexed as to the film’s motives. Is this comedy or satire? Is Pansy a sort of Larry David figure, taking a wrecking ball to the niceties that allow society to operate? Pansy is a Black British “Karen,” on the warpath against slights sometimes real but mostly imagined. She begins the film by chewing out her aimless teenage son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for leaving the peanut butter out or not keeping his room clean. She bitches at her husband Curtley (David Webber) for inquiring about dinner or being generally thoughtless. But she also verbally assaults random shopkeepers or people in parking lots, accusing them of being patronizing, stupid, benignly or smugly racist. Under the pretense of maintaining her pride in a difficult world, Pansy is spiteful and hair-triggered, always scrapping for a fight.
By contrast, Leigh shows us Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) and her two daughters, joking around and generally enjoying life, despite its unavoidable annoyances. One of the only moments of respite for Pansy is when she visits Chantelle to get her hair done. Leigh clearly understands the cultural and personal significance of the beauty shop for Black women, as a site of community and a space apart from the dominant assumptions of white privilege. But even in these moments, Pansy is fitful and irritated, secretly resentful toward Chantelle’s joie de vivre. As we eventually learn, the younger woman’s happiness may have come at the expense of her big sister, who took the brunt of their late mother’s criticism and had to care for Chantelle when Pansy herself was only 14.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Hard Truths evolves into a heartbreaking x-ray of a woman who has always felt she had to settle for less, to struggle more, and steel herself against nonstop assaults on her humanity. Things come to a head during a family get-together for Mothers Day, when Pansy can no longer proactively lash out at the world. She refuses to eat, and Chantelle also skips lunch in solidarity with her emotionally overcome sister. Curtley, meanwhile, stuffs his face and, in one seemingly insignificant moment, clarifies just how painfully lacking their marriage has always been. (By contrast, Moses surprises Pansy with a bouquet of flowers, a small gesture that speaks volumes to Pansy.) Spite having turned to devastation, Pansy crumbles, and is forced to finally recognize that if she fails to take action against her own misery, she’ll have no one to blame but herself.
Leigh, along with his ace D.P. Dick Pope, creates a strikingly antiseptic visual environment for this highly attenuated melodrama. With its white middle-class interiors, IKEA furnishings, and Pottery Barn wall decor, Hard Truths is like a gallery space showcasing a broken family collapsing in on itself like a dying star. In many respects, this is an exemplary “late film” from an unparalleled director, someone who is not only in command of his craft, but fully trusts his creative instincts. There has been some speculation as to why Hard Truths world premiered in Toronto. Insiders have all but confirmed that the film was rejected by Venice. If we think about the politics of contemporary art institutions, there are a few things one might conjecture about this situation.
First, Hard Truths is Leigh’s first film with an all-Black cast. There are undoubtedly those who feel Leigh is not equipped or even authorized to tell this story, in much the same way many festivals rejected the Dardennes’ Young Ahmed. Some may take issue with these characters’ delivery of Leigh’s carefully sculpted verbal rancor, and certainly Hard Truths offers breaks in verisimilitude for those who choose to look for them. But the main issue might be a lot more banal than all that. Festival programmers, like any other group of viewers, tend to make judgments about films based on their first 15 or 20 minutes, and even as they watch the rest of the film, those initial impressions can be difficult to shake. Taken at face value, Hard Truths’ opening scenes could seem as if Pansy’s venom is endorsed by Leigh, the film serving as a post-Naked rant by an angry old man but placed in the mouth of one of our greatest actresses. This would be unspeakably indulgent, were it not for the fact that Hard Truths is in fact doing the exact opposite of this. Mike Leigh, one of cinema’s last great humanists, has chosen to remind us that bitterness consumes everything, and that it is impossible to love others until you find the strength to heal.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 1.
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