Mike Leigh creates another masterful domestic melodrama in Hard Truths, a film that follows the daily life of neurotic curmudgeon and housewife Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). Pansy lives in an immaculately clean (borderline anti-septic) London townhome with brow-beaten husband Curtley (David Webber) and timid son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). She spends her days sleeping into the evening, watching television, and going on caustic rants. She complains about impropriety in modern-day women’s dress, the generally poor quality of customer service, and her son’s laziness. Pansy’s home life is as tense as a pressure cooker, and only she is privy to the dials.
For much of the film, the viewer follows Pansy around as she angrily blithers about one imposition or another. She verbally accosts a sales attendant at a furniture store, harangues fellow shoppers at the grocery, and even lashes out at her hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) for pulling her hair too tight. The amount of vitriol that Jean-Baptiste can summon as Pansy is a true testament to her seasoned acting ability. The character is a complicated mesh of a regretful mother and wife, a raving lunatic, and a pitiable shrew. Moses and Curtley, on the other hand, are quietly disdainful of Pansy but daren’t say a word against her for fear of summoning her torrential wrath. They simply man the battlements and prepare for the brunt.
We learn that Pansy is an agoraphobic who fears the insects and animals of the outdoors as much as she fears her fellow man. As the film progresses, her frantic anxiety worsens and ultimately reaches its zenith when she and Chantelle pay respects at the grave of their mother, with whom Pansy had a troubled relationship. Afterward, the pair return to Chantelle’s apartment for a family get-together. It is there that Pansy exhibits a glimmer of self-awareness when she chokes out a thank-you to Moses for gifting her flowers for Mother’s Day. Moses quietly acknowledges her watery-eyed thanks as he stares uncaringly out the apartment’s living room window.
Hard Truths is a piercing, skillful case study on the mind of a neurotic nuclear mother. The type of bedraggled, self-victimized matriarch that only acts to expel pent-up anxiety rather than to seek solutions. A true victim of having too much time on her hands, Pansy emotionally encumbers her and others’ daily lives not simply for fear’s sake alone, but for fear of fear itself. She adjudicates her quasi-schizophrenic thoughts late into the night and her punishing mind is an endless miasma of ambient worries. She is so accustomed to flickering through unlikely hypotheticals like an endless newsreel that she almost comes to enjoy it. In the end, even the sweet, homely Curtley is revealed to be caught in Pansy’s toxic wake when he vengefully throws out Pansy’s Mother’s Day flowers.
There are moments in Hard Truths when one thinks that Pansy might just have a chance to improve. At the Mother’s Day family gathering, she acknowledges to Chantelle that she is unhappy with Curtley and wants to separate. Chantelle urges Pansy to do so for the sake of all parties. Towards the end of the film, Pansy allows herself to ever-so-slightly crack open her backyard door and sniff the outside air. Winds change, however, when in the final minutes of the film Curtley throws his back out, causing Pansy much irritation. Clearly, there is little hope for salvage.
Long after you’ve left the theatre, Hard Truths will stick to you like mucilage, and it couldn’t be clearer why Mike Leigh is one of the greats of our time. In my view, he ranks amongst other highly laudable “women’s pictures” directors like George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Pedro Almodóvar. Disquieting and insightful, Hard Truths is one of the best films at TIFF 2024.
