drama

Hard Truths is a horror movie

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Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London. It’s also a tough watch.

By Jackson Weaver

I asked a group of film-lovers a question recently: what’s a movie you adored but never, ever want to watch again?

The responses, and the reasoning behind them, were fairly unsurprising. Requiem for a Dream, Come and See, Midsommar: powerful stories whose exploration of the extremes of human cruelty and suffering leave you strung out, squirming, taut and exhausted. And, most importantly, with no particular itch to return.

With Hard Truths, we may have another title for the pile. It’s a surprising addition given the subject matter — no war crimes, flyblown corpses or sewn-up bear carcasses are to be found in writer-director Mike Leigh’s newest effort. Instead, it’s an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London.

There’s Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), the stay-at-home adult son whose hidden life only rarely opens to show glimpses of repressed passion (a preoccupation with planes, pilots and all things flying) and suppressed rage (a middle finger pointed at a closed door).

There’s the father, Curtley (David Webber), a sad-eyed professional tradesman who spends more time being talked at by his surrogate work-son than talking with his actual offspring. There’s the gregarious but grieving aunt; the bubbly cousin stymied at work; and our central character, the mother, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste).

 

Pansy is immured in a fortress of bitterness she can’t help but reinforce. She’s a scowling serial complainer, the kind of dependably cruel customer who prompts senior retail workers to tap new hires on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll take this one.”

Difficult character study

Pansy complains about never being invited to events, and complains when she’s asked to go. She furiously scrubs and cleans every inch of her home and body, then sleeps through the day out of exhaustion brought on by myriad non-specific health concerns.

She screams in wild terror when woken, reared-up and walleyed like a cornered animal — though why she would feel cornered in her aggressively beige, suburban home isn’t immediately clear. It’s not until she screams at a similarly cornered animal in her backyard — a terrified fox looking for a way out of the trap it willingly walked into — that the film’s conceit starts to crystallize. In both cases, they are backing away from Pansy’s husband.

As a character study, Hard Truths is painfully good. It might be the most accurate portrayal of borderline personality disorder ever put on screen, and could become as well-known for depicting that condition as No Country for Old Men is for representing psychopathy. In fact, Hard Truths ruminates so incessantly and incisively on the type of person whose irrational fear of abandonment leads to emotional explosions that it could find use as a shorthand. Instead of lengthy pamphlets or uncomfortable conversations, worried relatives could ask: “Just curious, have you seen Hard Truths?”

Michele Austin (right) with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths.
Michele Austin, right, appears as Pansy’s sister Chantelle in Hard Truths. (Bleeker Street)

If it sounds sparse in terms of story, that’s because it is. Other than Pansy and her sister planning and re-planning a visit to their mother’s grave, Hard Truths is hard up for a plot. It instead rests on the power of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, and the authenticity of the backgrounds she and her surrounding cast represent.

The first, as a woman trapped in a domestic nightmare of her own making, is relentlessly compelling. Jean-Baptiste puts in the tireless work of bringing Pansy to life; not only as a curmudgeon, but one so ensnared by her patterns she can’t pull back from them — even as she watches them destroy her.

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Review: Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths”: I couldn’t bare the misery anymore

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By Adam Bloodworth

As one of Britain’s greatest living film-makers, Mike Leigh launched the careers of British acting royalty, including Gary Oldman, Alison Steadman and Tim Roth. But goodness gracious me, he’s a right old misery guts. To mark the release of his new film Hard Truths, Vulture even wrote a listicle ranking his films by how miserable they are.

Leigh’s Palme d’Or-winning work asks questions about power structures and how they relate to the working classes, in films like 1983’s Meantime and 2002’s All or Nothing. In those and much else, he manages to capture the feelings of the time. But Hard Truths, Leigh’s first feature film since British historical drama Peterloo in 2018, is so comprehensively gloomily and oppressively negative that it often becomes a painful viewing experience. It is the filmic equivalent of spending hours with a family member who just won’t stop moaning and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It’s a shame, because Leigh has spent over half a century showing he clearly truly understands the lives of his subjects. Hard Truths follows one working class black family living in London, particularly matriarch Pansy who is struggling with PTSD and cannot find a single positive thing to say. If it feels slightly uncomfortable that an 81-year-old white man is writing a cohort of young black female characters, Leigh reassures with a funny and moving script that properly fleshes out these people.

Another examination of misery and trauma, but it’s too much

It’s not Pansy actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s fault that her performance exasperates. She is an engrossing actor, but for one hour and forty minutes, the character is moaning about absolutely everything. She delivers laboured barbs at her depressive son Moses, commendably realised by Tuwaine Barrett, and her long-suffering sister, given addictively zesty energy by Michele Austin. But there isn’t enough time to enjoy these characters before it returns to Pansy’s criticisms. I suppose Leigh’s writing is true to life; these people do exist, but there are other ways to get at the character’s own mental cage than this literal examination of her hour-to-hour existence.

It’s often funny too, Leigh has a knack for writing a damning insult, although, yep, the comedy is often diffused too quickly by the inevitable moaning that returns every other minute. I actually turned away from the screen at one point, unable to bear the sight nor sound of it anymore.

Leigh brightly captures suburban London, bathing ordinary houses handsomely in shards of morning light. Neighbourhood corner shops look attractive; these people may have small flats but Leigh’s version of the capital isn’t a bad place to be. He is a master at capturing a personality with a close-up; more often than not we feel inches away from Pansy, Leigh’s intimate direction lingering a little longer than you’d think to luxuriate in character.

It’s a gleaming filmic product, but the hard truth is it’s a shame it’s so hard to watch.

Source: Hard Truths by Mike Leigh, London Film Festival review: I couldn’t bare the misery anymore

Review: “Georgy Girl” Is No Feminist Statement

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By Mark Fraser

Viewed with a proverbial pinch of salt, Silvio Narizzano’s Georgy Girl (1966) is what UK-based media commentator Leanne Weston aptly calls “a comedy of manners turned social critique set amidst the backdrop of ‘Swinging London’”.

It is also, Weston adds in her 2018 essay on the film, “about a world and a girl in transition”, in which the titular character Georgina “Georgy” Parkin (Lynn Redgrave) is portrayed at different times as either “an object of inspiration, affection or ridicule”.

More to the point, though, she is also seen as an object of desire, and it’s this treatment of the protagonist that gives the film’s narrative a sinister undertone as it pretends – in line with The Seekers’ song on which it is partly based – to be a tale about liberation and individualism when in fact, behind its genial facade, it is really one concerning incarceration and servitude.

Or, to put it another way, there’s quite a bit of unpleasant subtext at work in this movie.

Sure – the awkwardly individualistic Georgy has undergone something of a transformation by the end of the film as she achieves what appears to be a form of compromised marital bliss.

But how she gets there does, at times, touch upon the highly dubious.

During the first third of the story, for instance, Georgy’s father’s rich employer James Leamington (James Mason) – a childless businessman who insists he always looked upon her as a daughter while she was growing up in his house – suggests they enter a written contract whereby she becomes his mistress (this while his wife Ellen, played by Rachel Kempson, is dying). Oddly, despite balking at this generous offer to effectively be his whore, by the movie’s conclusion she has ended up marrying the man – an act which allows her, in the words of The Seekers at least, to become “a new Georgy girl”.

Meanwhile, Georgy’s in-residence butler dad Ted (Bill Owen) more or less pimps her off to his boss (admittedly this is only suggested in a brief exchange of dialogue; nevertheless the implication is there), reaffirming his and his wife Doris’ (Clare Kelly) fear that their lone offspring is an awkward loser whose only real hope in life is to attach herself to some well-to-do gent.

And, before she eventually ties the knot with Leamington, the hitherto virginal heroine has an affair with Jos Jones (Alan Bates), who has just married her roommate/best friend Meredith (Charlotte Rampling) after the latter becomes pregnant.

To complicate matters, following the baby’s arrival a bitterly post-natal Meredith – who has already aborted previous pregnancies with Jones – decides she will adopt the infant out, at which point Georgy steps in as the surrogate mother. In effect this not only allows her to strengthen her connection with the soon-to-be divorced father, but also forces her to lie to the UK Government’s social services agency in order to keep her “daughter” Sara (actor unknown).

But when her happy-go-lucky lover irresponsibly throws caution to the wind by quitting his stifling job at the bank, Georgy has to reassess everything and, it’s at this point, she decides the lecherous old Leamington (who’s actually only 49) is the better option. Unfortunately, this development looks like it too may eventually be fraught with difficulty when – just as the newly-weds are being driven away from the church ceremony – her husband’s face seriously drops as it dawns on him that he hasn’t just secured a new (and much younger) squeeze who he has known since she was a baby, but will now have to compete with someone else’s child for his bride’s affections.

Thus, how their life of marital bliss will pan out becomes one of the story’s big unknowns as it’s here that the end credits roll. If anything, it is likely much of the above-mentioned unsavouriness dogging Georgy’s existence will continue as she embarks on what is in no way a certain future.

Mixed message

Georgy Girl

While this might sound like a grimly sanctimonious interpretation of a movie which, in many ways, tries to pass itself off as a melodramatic comedy, the conclusion is still inescapable – the ugly duckling heroine may have become something of a swan, but she ultimately looks set to remain stranded in the same stagnant pond. Or, to put it bluntly (and contrary to what the plot might otherwise be suggesting), it’s highly unlikely there will ever be a completely satisfactory existence for this woman.

In her above-mentioned essay on the film, which is included in the promotional material accompanying Powerhouse Films Ltd’s Blu-ray release of Georgy Girl, Weston acknowledges it does not treat its leading character “with warmth or hold her in such high regard” as audiences of the day did. Rather, “she is side-lined in her own story”; an interesting observation given Redgrave, in real life (and, one might add, quite unfairly) received third billing behind Mason and Bates.

“From today’s vantage point, Georgy just seems like an ordinary girl: vivacious, flawed, yet lovable – someone we could be friends with,” the critic says. “And that’s what makes the film so interesting.”

Perhaps. However, it’s also arguable that much of the movie’s intrigue stems from the fact its outlook is decidedly brutal. No one in the film, for instance, seems to have a particularly strong moral compass. Furthermore, at the end of its cinematic day, Swinging London is portrayed as a dead end; a place where wanton hedonism may be commonplace, but the privileged class still gets what it wants so long as it’s willing to pay the price. Thus, as a commentary about what was then the emerging youth culture’s attempt to distance itself from a stuffier (read older) generation, Georgy Girl actually turns out to be quite pessimistic.

This begs the question: is this what the film makers – particularly screenwriters Margaret Forster (who wrote the novel on which the movie is based) and Peter Nichols – set out to do?

Possibly, but it is quite difficult to ascertain as the quirky and upbeat feel of the whole narrative doesn’t seem to have an overtly ironic (or tragic) bone in its bubbly celluloid body.

Interestingly, Redgrave more or less agreed that the film’s portrayal of her character was not exactly positive when being interviewed by journalist Howard Maxford back in 1996.

“George (sic) is quite ruthless really,” she said. “So it is an immoral story, but George was such a survivor that people identified with her.”

Survival, though, comes at a cost – something, it seems, which may have been lost on progressive audiences of the day. As for contemporary viewers who embrace the values of the Me Too movement, they no doubt will find very few redeeming values in this ultimately sexist tale.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leanne Weston: “Good Girl, Bad Luck: Morality and Performance in Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, pp 5-13

Howard Maxford: “Making Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, p 28

Source: Review: “Georgy Girl” Is No Feminist Statement

This WW2 crime drama is the perfect show for the ‘new normal’

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In our latest essay in which a critic reflects on culture that brings them joy, Fiona Mountford explains why the detective show Foyle’s War has been helping her keep calm and carry on.

There is a corner of our living room that will be forever the southern England coastal town of Hastings in World War Two. In it sit – or rather stand, perpetually poised for official duty – Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, Sergeant Paul Milner and police driver Samantha Stewart, the last on long-term loan from the Mechanised Transport Corps. On they tirelessly work, through 19 feature-length episodes of Foyle’s War, Anthony Horowitz’s magnificent detective drama set on the British Home Front, from the aftermath of the disastrous Norwegian campaign in 1940 all the way through to VE Day five long years later. These 19 episodes, or 29-ish hours of viewing, have for the past decade constituted a place for my family so safe and happy that we have in fact watched the entire series three times. Which makes it 87 hours of television, all in.

The great irony is that we almost didn’t watch Foyle’s War at all. We certainly never saw it during the years it was originally broadcast in the UK, 2002-2008, erroneously, not to mention snobbishly, supposing that a wartime drama aired on pre-watershed primetime ITV on a Sunday night would constitute glib jingoism. Friends tried to tell us how wrong we were, but we stuck stubbornly to this entirely unsubstantiated opinion. My father was especially sceptical; having lived through World War Two, been evacuated and all the rest of it, he had a profound dislike of anything that looked back with even a small dose of rose-tinted nostalgia at life on the Home Front. “It wasn’t much fun, I can tell you that”, was about the most he would say on the subject, choosing instead to spend his leisure time watching contemporary films and dramas.

The show’s central crime-busting trio are Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, Sergeant Paul Milner and police driver Samantha Stewart (Credit: Shutterstock)

The show’s central crime-busting trio are Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, Sergeant Paul Milner and police driver Samantha Stewart (Credit: Shutterstock)

Still the niggling thought kept on niggling: if those who had actually watched the programme continued to expound its virtues and to berate our stubborn-headedness for not giving it a try, perhaps there might be something in this Foyle’s War programme after all. With no little trepidation I bought the first series on DVD – remember those? – for my Dad’s birthday and here’s the not exactly stunning revelation: it was just as good, subtle and thoughtful, as everyone had said, and from the first episode, The German Woman, we were hooked.

Foyle, played by the truly magnificent Michael Kitchen, conveys more in a single twitch of an eyebrow than a dozen other actors could in an hour of shouting and gesticulation

Far from cheap flag-waving, the headline note of Foyle’s War is instead weary patriotism, with its focus on people struggling on, often not understanding why they’re being asked to do what they’re doing but doing it anyway, due to a sometimes frayed belief that it must be for the common good. On they valiantly trudge, occasionally bombed out of lodgings by air raids but still bringing to book dubious military masterminds and black-market racketeers, while the lightbulbs in the police station are gradually and bewilderingly taken away in the name of the war effort.

A tribute to human resilience

When lockdown got under way, I knew that there was one television programme above all others that would keep Mum and me company night after night. Although we had watched all of Foyle’s War (all the original programmes, that is; after it was cancelled it was subsequently recommissioned for a few straggling, struggling, post-war episodes that were nowhere near the same standard) twice already, we had not had the courage to go near it since my Dad died five years previously. It was too bound up with happy memories of evenings in with him. Yet with this strange new ‘home front’ life we were suddenly being forced into, nothing seemed more apposite than a drama about the British people stoically keeping calm and carrying on week after weary week, often in the toughest of circumstances, with ‘normal life’ at a standstill, food supplies sometimes bewilderingly scarce, and loved ones suddenly dying. In a double layer of resonance, it also chimed perfectly with the recent VE Day commemorations and renewed interest in every aspect of life in wartime.

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