If you were to ask a computer programme to come up with a title for a new Mike Leigh film it could do no better than Hard Truths. Echoing the title of his very first film in 1971, Bleak Moments, Hard Truths represents a variation on the veteran British director’s recurrent theme of the delusions that keep us a step away from despair.
With a long production initially delayed by lockdown, Hard Truths is also Leigh’s return to a contemporary domestic setting after the historical dramas Mr Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018).
The film centres on Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a middle-aged woman who lives with her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber, and their monosyllabic adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Pansy is annoyed, although what exactly she is annoyed at is never made clear.
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Jean-Baptiste depicts Pansy as a constant fount of exasperation. The film is punctuated by her lengthy tirades as she berates anyone who intrudes on her solitude: sales assistants, impatient drivers, a garden fox and most frequently her close, perplexed family.
Hard Truths is a comedy-drama about depression. We never hear of any diagnosis nor of any particular hardship or misfortune that Pansy has suffered. At one point Pansy’s sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) pleads, “Why can’t you just enjoy yourself?”, to which Pansy responds with a frustrated, “I don’t know”. By refusing to offer any explanations the film exhibits a trait that is also characteristic of depression, in which a person is unable to find meaning in their life.
This monotony risks making Hard Truths a hard watch. But it is made palatable by two things. The first is the uninhibited scorn expressed by Pansy to her random antagonists, who typically move from trying to placate her to giving as good as they get. The abandonment of any prohibition to bite one’s lip provides a pleasing image of what social life would be like with the mask of civility torn off.
The second thing is the presence of Pansy’s sister Chantelle and her two daughters. As unstoppable optimists, they provide a polar opposition to Pansy and her family. If Chantelle’s family provide a pulse to keep the film moving, it is the rapport between Chantelle and Pansy that eventually provides its heart.
Jean-Baptiste’s pairing with Austin reunites them from Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996), the director’s breakthrough film on the international market. The drawback is that the men in the film do little more than look morose.
Hard Truths could then be seen as Leigh’s entry into a small subgenre of films in which a celebrated male auteur depicts an unbalanced female psyche. Notable examples would include Michelangelo Antonioni directing Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964), Ingmar Bergman with Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Persona (1966) and Pedro Almodóvar with Carmen Maura in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988).
These films each offer spectacular visions of mental breakdown. Hard Truths, however, is almost completely devoid of stylisation, not even adopting the shaky handheld camera that conventionally signals unflinching realism, as in Leigh’s earlier Secrets and Lies. Hard Truths aims instead for a televisual look, even in its opening credits, which play over an exterior shot of the suburban home where the action takes place.
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This action is quite loosely connected, like a series of sketches rather than the unifying trajectory of a dramatic arc. Hard Truths is not a film that tries to emulate the intensity of a moment of breakdown. It presents instead a situation where nothing changes at all.
Pansy in Hard Truths is an inversion of the protagonist of Leigh’s earlier Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Poppy (Sally Hawkins), whose sunny disposition is continuously at odds with the people surrounding her. Leigh’s dramatic universe tends to be populated by two kinds of people: optimists and pessimists. Characters do not grow and they do not change. People are either miserable or they are cheerful, co-existing and contemplating each other in mutual incomprehension.
The outlook Leigh expresses in his cinema often seems to struggle between the caricatured and the heartfelt, the snigger and the tear. In this, it might also be tempting to see Pansy as an expression of something in Leigh himself. Disappointed, prickly, cynically distant from other people, she also gives enough hints that deep down, she is afraid of her own yearning for an emotional connection.
If there is any truth revealed by the end of Leigh’s latest film, then it is what we might call the truth of hardship itself – the idea that despite our hopes, the only authentic reality is that life is hard. And yet as the film also shows, hope remains and comforts, however small, are possible.
