Mike Leigh’s first film for six years is a close study of mental ill health and lack of communication in an extended London family.
It reunites him with the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who won an Oscar nomination for their 1996 collaboration, Secrets and Lies. Here, she plays Pansy, a middle-aged woman whose fear of just about everything in the outside world – dirt, germs, birds, people – manifests as a remorseless, disgusted hostility.
It’s an unflinching, detailed character study, but Hard Truths is hard work. Pansy isn’t much fun to be around, for her kin or for us. She’s rather like the flipside of Sally Hawkins’s relentlessly chirpy Poppy in Leigh’s 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky, a figure whose one-note mood, however impressively realised, steadily wears you down.
When Pansy finally does, briefly, soften and unbend, it’s very moving, but until then her implacable bitterness is exhausting to experience.
We first see her waking, after her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) has left for work, with a startled shout that made the woman next to me jump out of her seat. Next, she’s maniacally cleaning the sofa, and haranguing her lugubrious son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for leaving food waste around.
Through the course of a few days we watch her rail at neighbours, shoppers and sales assistants, and the doctor and dentist she has consulted for pain in her abdomen, head and jaw.
Meanwhile Pansy’s hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, another Leigh favourite) enjoys a largely cheery life with her two lively daughters, Kayla and Aleisha. While Curtley and Moses skirt around Pansy like beaten dogs, Chantelle alone tries to get behind the angry wall she presents to the world. “Stuff happens when I go out,” Pansy says, grimly. “What stuff?” Chantelle asks. “People!” Pansy replies.
The two women are mourning their mother Pearl, who apparently favoured Chantelle. Are Pansy’s rage, her obsessive-compulsive behaviour and her reported physical symptoms down to grief? We never learn: the only hint of a diagnosis is a packet of diazepam glimpsed on a bedside table.
There’s a similar unspoken suggestion that Moses, who is obsessed with aircraft, overeats and silently endures the abuse of his peers on lonely walks, is also depressed or has a learning disability. Curtly is an almost complete enigma.
Using his favoured method, Leigh worked with his cast to create characters and situations before writing the script. This creates some lovely moments, of Chantelle and her colleagues gossiping with clients, and snapshots of her daughters’ lives. It also presumably led Jonathan Livingstone to the bizarre decision that his character Virgil, Curtley’s employee, should be solely defined by historical anecdotes about time.
There’s a moment of hopeful relief near the end, a gesture of friendship to Moses from an unnamed girl on the steps around the statue of Eros (actually Anteros, but never mind) at Piccadilly Circus. After 90 minutes of Pansy’s unchanging, unreachable, fearful fury, it’s too little, too late.
