In 1892, Ruth Belville took up the family business. It was a trade inherited from her mother, first founded by her father. He had innovated a peculiar means of income: selling the time. Ruth would set her watch by the time at the Greenwich Observatory, and correct the clocks of her paying clients thereby. We must imagine that outside of Ruth’s buggy there was a swirl and a relativity of ticking clocks — all of which in subtle (or unsubtle) syncopation. Her business could only persist if the absolute value of Time was not inherently knowable; that there was some true meter by which so much contrary ticking could be measured. We might interpret Hard Truths in such a way: a collision of ticks, no one able to rightly tune the various clocks to their right time. We know only that these clocks cannot agree; which one fell out of time, how, and when — these things are not knowable. However encompassing time might be, we can only access it in the immediate. The cacophony began before we arrived. Virgil, a wide-eyed plumber we see only briefly in the film, is preoccupied with time. He mentions Ruth — the Greenwich Time Lady — before correcting the basis of her business. Time cannot be bought or sold; it passes; it expires. Most optimistically: it moves. In his later appearance, he seems to be talking about Haydn’s so-called “Clock” symphony, in which the second movement contains a persistent “ticking” motive. The piece is essentially light-hearted, but there is some grim texture built into the incessant ticking of a clock. Some reminder of mortality, or of a psychiatrist’s office. It is the sound heard in very quiet rooms; it is the first interruption to a sudden silence.
Hard Truths is not, in its exterior, a film about time. It concerns an ornery woman, Pansy, in a constant state of anger and of anguish; a deeply unpleasant person whose inner void seems to draw in all life and light around her. We meet her in the midst of this state, and we are given no specific rationale as to how she became this way. Her home feels antiseptic and mirthless. Her husband is browbeaten and quiet; her son seems to have completely withdrawn from life. He is fascinated by planes: an easy metaphor for escape. The course of the film is not built on any particular narrative system, but rather a general increase in pressure. Most screenings will experience a curious detail of audience participation. Early in the film, Pansy’s snark provokes a general laughter. The film looks to be some modern rejig of the screwball comedy, weaving gags into outburst after outburst of articulate rage. The film will push on, but the laughs diminish. There is no moment, per se, in which the film tells us it isn’t funny anymore. Each member of the audience will decide for themselves. But by the final passages there is no more laughter. Such lengthy exposure to this woman’s constant bile seems to have a dousing effect: we begin to wonder what can make a person this way, and how long such a person can go on living in society. Every incident is fodder for conflict; every possibility for confrontation is taken up. Her ire is not always unjustified; but so interwoven is her justice and her injustice that we struggle to untangle the two. Is this a woman who is subject to a bad marriage, or a woman whose nature has made a marriage bad — or indeed, the two at once? Leigh guides this story so as to encourage an ambivalence, and to obscure any easy diagnosis. But more essentially, his method is to obscure any way forward, or escape from this barbed nest Pansy lives within.
Here we return to the ticking clock. Time past and time present. Pansy’s sister, Chantelle, serves as a device of contrast and revelation. Her happiness makes Pansy’s unhappiness yet grimmer; and through her we are afforded snippets of some difficult past in which Pansy was forced to take on a responsibility greater than a child ought to. So we compose a vague accumulation of past faults and inequities. We can imagine a difficult, fraught childhood; we can imagine an unwise and fractious marriage; we can imagine the trouble in bringing up her own son in such a light. On this we can attach general accumulations: the stress endured in a racist society; the rattle of Covid lockdowns, briefly mentioned. Leigh achieves a remarkably complex history, and array of relationships, despite the minimalism of his narrative mode. But within all of these assorted ideas lies the boulder of time. A heaviness of the past, a sense that Pansy is the effect of so many causes, and that she cannot undo her state in much the same way that one cannot turn back the clock. These things have happened; the pivotal drama of the piece is in the past tense. Pansy’s son, Moses, seems in a state of near-catatonic depression. Tuwaine Barrett performs the part with a fine subtlety — the film’s acting is universally sharp — as his character wiles away the days on walks to nowhere; in attempting to disappear. But his age is always of central relevance: that a 22-year-old has failed to make something of himself is more significant — and so much less hopeful — than some younger person. Moses is almost a totem of Pansy’s inner world; the consequence of 22 years of bleak pressure. If Moses is to be considered a difficult case, by nature of his age, what might we think of Pansy? A woman past her middle-age, who in the course of the narrative comes not nearer but further from restitution; a woman who, by the final climax of the film, has yet another layer of misery lain upon her already dismal existence. Of course, by now we do not find her merely unpleasant, so much as acutely sympathetic. This is the effect of Leigh’s formal persistence: we do not need the characters to experience any great shift to find ourselves reinterpreting our relationship with them. Leigh instead encourages a sense of milieu; he establishes the greater orbit of Pansy’s life — in past and in present — in order to understand her not as a protagonist, or antagonist, but rather as one part of a wider unit. These characters shape one another in each other’s presence; their associations seem to stand in place of a traditional drama or plot. This is the root of Leigh’s superlative exposition of character: an expression not of action but of time. That which was, and that which is — and the asynchronous ticking of so many clocks.
