Words by JANE CROWTHER
Some of the hard truths at the heart of Mike Leigh’s latest fall easily from the mouth of Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a misanthrope London mother and housewife whose daily diatribe at, and about, other people hides a crushing depression and self-loathing. When she’s not furiously polishing the leather sofa in the lounge, Pansy is berating her layabout son, scolding her cowed husband or shouting at random people in car parks or the health professionals at the dentist and doctors. She even has a scowl and a harsh word for the pigeons and a passing fox that dare to enter her garden. By contrast, her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is a laidback hairdresser with the patience of a saint and a vibrant social life that involves her two grown, ambitious daughters. She sees the boiling rage and frustration emanating from her sister (Pansy of course criticises her hairdressing skills) but struggles to tell her sibling a hard truth; that Pansy clearly needs mental health support.
A reunion of Leigh and Jean-Baptiste after their collaboration on 1996’s Secrets And Lies, Hard Truths marks a return to the velvet glove punch of the auteur’s trademark observational dramedy. With cinematography by longtime collaborator Dick Pope, Leigh allows seemingly insubstantial suburban moments to be captured as Pansy goes about her day which accumulate into a sorrow for a woman who can demand to see the manager, that checkout assistants smile more and that her husband never eats fried chicken in the house but cannot ask for the help she desperately needs.
The success in making an audience care about such a curmudgeon who even criticises a baby for wearing an outfit with pockets is due to Leigh’s sly script (gently unpicking a deep-seated trauma in Pansy from her mother’s death) and Jean-Baptiste’s performance which is the very definition of powerhouse. She rightfully deserves the heat she’s currently getting on the trophy trail. Pansy is monstrous and ridiculous, yet funny (she has a point about the baby) and vulnerable. A scene in which the two sisters attend the grave of their mother is so brusquely affectionate that it is heartwarming as Chantelle tells Pansy something many audience members will recognise in their own family relations.
They say that we can choose our friends but not our family and in this bittersweet meander through a world many of us know intimately, perhaps that is the hardest truth of all.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Hard Truths is in cinemas now
