Pockets on babygrows and feet on new sofas. Parking and flowers and disregard of coasters. Foxes and packaging and dating and grins, these are a few of Pansy’s least favourite things. What the heroine of Mike Leigh’s steamingly brilliant new drama does like is less clear. She spends her days under the bedcovers or further scrubbing her already-sterile semi or berating anyone who wanders into her crosshairs. But none of those bring her any actual pleasure.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is on the precipice, yelling at the waves. Stricken by some horrific depression or trauma-triggered rage, she barrels through the world like a toxic improv Larry David, picking holes in everything, bubbling over with a caustic confidence that’s 90% jaundice, 10% justified.
She is not, I think, an especially accurate portrayal of depression. And her being held up as such feels unhelpful to the cause of Leigh’s most searing and uncompromising film in years: a true psychological thriller, or perhaps a psycho-horror.
Hard Truths is one of the most gripping films I’ve seen in ages, because you have no idea what Pansy will do next, or whether those around her – her joyful sister, taciturn husband, cowering son – will snap. You watch it clutching the seat, holding your breath, as even the moments of apparent catharsis are made a mockery of, healing undone before it’s ever begun.
Leigh hadn’t shot a film set in the present day since 2010’s Another Year – shot round the corner from this, a milder cousin, more gentleness in the mix. He hadn’t made one with Jean-Baptiste for 28 years, since Secrets and Lies, her breakthrough, which was funny and compassionate as well as brutal, so awards bodies were happy to embrace it.
This one may prove too challenging. If they want a shot at an Oscar, middle-aged women in movies tend to have to transgressively cop off with a younger colleague, or belt out an aria, or have body parts drop off and explode in an attempt to stay young. Getting disproportionately cross in a car park doesn’t quite cut it – a pity, for Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy is a performance of acid immensity, and one some smaller awards bodies have already given a cheering leg-up.
Hard Truths is a strange, morbid miracle. It’s an almost entirely black domestic drama by a white director that feels entirely, drably authentic. Long after you’ve watched it the eerie terror of that unravelling returns to you, myriad unresolved moments eating away. Cracking up is easy to do. Pansy is very good at it. Leigh and Jean-Baptiste are yet better.
