Mike Leigh’s first feature film, Bleak Moments, appeared almost 50 years ago, in 1971. For 40 years, working first in TV and then in film, he steadily produced his distinctive domestic dramas, all character driven, created from extended improvisatory rehearsals with his actors.
The last of this extraordinary series of miserabilist comedies was Another Year in 2010. Since then, Leigh has made two historical films, the terrific Mr Turner (2014) – Timothy Spall gurning and grunting as the great painter – and the righteous dud Peterloo (2018). Now, at 81, Leigh has returned for a coda in his classic mode.
Hard Truths, his shortest, most severe movie, is a close-up portrait of a deeply unhappy, intolerably aggressive and contemptuous woman, surely the nastiest female lead ever. Yet Leigh, being Leigh, asks us to have empathy, to feel compassion for her, despite giving us only the most glancing reasons for doing so, beyond the fact that she too is human.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), in her late fifties, lives in a pleasant enough house in suburban London with her crushed, silenced husband, Curtley (David Webber), a plumber, and their unemployed, depressed and obese son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Not to beat about the bush, Pansy hates life itself. All life.
We meet her in her bedroom, as she wakes with a horrific shriek, having been disturbed by a pigeon. Pansy, we learn, hates birds, plants and people equally. She has reduced her house to utter sterility, madly polishing her leather sofa. She incessantly attacks her husband and son for offences such as overfilling the kettle. When Moses leaves a banana skin in the kitchen, she erupts in fury: “What’s this? Don’t you have any hopes or dreams? What are your ambitions?” She’s the one who has extinguished them.
Pansy extends her contempt to the world at large. Charity fundraisers? “Cheerful, grinning people, I can’t stand them!” Dogs in coats? “Why… it’s got fur.” Cute baby clothes? “What’s a baby got pockets for?” She picks a fight with everyone she meets – a dentist, a doctor, a shop assistant – abusing them horribly. Then she goes home and says she’s been harassed all day. “You don’t know my suffering! You don’t know my pain!”
Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle (delightful Michele Austin) is her opposite. Cheerful and responsive, she’s a popular hairdresser, a single mum with two sparky daughters. Their family is warm and affectionate, sprawling over each other, singing and dancing. Chantelle’s flat is welcoming: full of house plants – the lares et penates of today – vivifiers that Pansy can’t abide.
Chantelle tries so hard with Pansy, coaxing her out to lay flowers, which she won’t even touch, on their mother’s grave. There’s a big scene. “Why don’t you enjoy life?” Chantelle asks. “I don’t know,” says Pansy miserably. “They all hate me.” “I love you,” Chantelle nobly insists. “I don’t understand you but I love you.” That’s about as far as we ever get in fathoming just why Pansy is the way she is. There follows one of those domestic set-pieces that are Leigh’s absolute speciality: a calamitous get-together. Chantelle hosts a Mother’s Day lunch for all the family, prosecco flowing. It emerges that Moses has brought his mother – guess what? – a bunch of flowers. Meltdown ensues.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste was the first black British actress to be Oscar nominated, for Leigh’s Secret & Lies in 1996. There, as a young woman discovering her white birth mother, she was enchanting, so judicious and kind, impossible not to love. In Hard Truths, she is even better, no less committed to this monstrosity. It’s a tour de force, another product of Leigh’s method of protracted workshopping and improvisation before the shoot (14 weeks of rehearsal, followed by a six-week shoot in this case). Pansy is as much her creation as Leigh’s, if not more so. (Leigh rightly rejects the idea that there’s anything problematic about him making a film with a black cast when this is his process.)
There is a problem, though. This method of character development leads to a strange over-emphasis, a thoroughgoing-ness that’s quite different from, say, Dickensian caricature, let alone reality. It minimises story, too. Hard Truths has almost no plot.
Every criticism that Matthew Arnold made of his poem Empedocles on Etna applies here. “Suffering finds no vent in action… a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged… there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” In actual life, Arnold observes, such situations are painful, not tragic, and the representation of them is painful too.
“Hard Truths” is in cinemas now
[See also: The monumental achievement of “The Brutalist”]
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