The legendary director joins the star of his new film HARD TRUTHS Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the Criterion Closet, where they share their love for Akira Kurosawa and Charles Burnett, reminisce about early moviegoing experiences, and select favorites for each other.
Hard Truths
Hard Truths is a horror movie
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?”
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.
Review: Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths”: I couldn’t bare the misery anymore
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
The Hard Truths of Mike Leigh
Fears, trauma, and family relationships come into focus in Mike Leigh’s existential drama, Hard Truths. The film examines the human condition as the characters struggle and survive in a post-pandemic world. Hard Truths will make you laugh and cry, possibly at the same time.
by Gill Pringle
A true original, it’s almost comical to imagine a version of British director Mike Leigh where he went to Hollywood.
Apart from his historical dramas, Leigh’s films have always been celebrations of ordinary British folk with ordinary problems, “kitchen sink dramas” as they have sometimes been called. His latest film, Hard Truths – competing in the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Official Selection – is no different.
Set in London, it explores family relationships in a post-pandemic world — namely, housewife Pansy, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, an unhappy, angry woman. Agoraphobic, hypochondriac and paranoid about animals, birds, insects, plants and flowers, she is confrontational with everyone, especially her plumber husband, Curtley (David Webber) and their stay-at-home unemployed adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).
“You couldn’t make a film like Hard Truths without the most fantastic, brilliant actors. All the actors that I work with are character actors. They’re actors who don’t just play themselves, don’t just perform their own narcissism. They actually are really good and passionate about making characters that are like real people out there in the street,” says the 81-year-old director, who was in feisty form at San Sebastian, the first time he has ever competed at this elegant festival.
Having previously directed Marianne Jean-Baptiste to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role in his 1996 film Secrets & Lies, he says of their latest collaboration, “We develop the character together, but if I started from the premise of the idea of the kind of person that Pansy is, and I found an actress who was like Pansy, it would be a nightmare, and we’d never make the film.
“But the thing is, that Marianne has got a great sense of humour and is a very generous, open, and passionate person who is able to create somebody like Pansy with total accuracy – but she is not Pansy.