Release Date – 31st January 2025, Cert – 12, Run-time – 1 hour 37 minutes, Director – Mike Leigh
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is bitter about the world around her, constantly pushing away her family and bringing them down, despite this her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) continues to extend a friendly hand.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a starkly bitter woman, taking issue with everything around her even a friendly smile from someone behind her in the shop queue is a problem. The world hates her, and in turn she’s started to hate it back. Constantly bringing down her family meal times are a pit of silence aside from her lengthy rants about her day of observing the world’s decline. She moves with topic to topic with increasing ease and fury, much to the amusement of the audience.
As if flicking a light-switch Jean-Baptiste and director Mike Leigh are able to turn these rants from hilarious outbursts to intensely dramatic tirades where you see just how cold the character is. Sympathy grows for her near-silent husband (David Webber) and 20-something son (Tuwaine Barrett), spending his days isolated away, occasionally going out for walks where he’s antagonised by possible former classmates. Even hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), who has a much more comfortable home-life with her two confident, striving-for-success daughters (Sophia Brown, Ani Nelson); the complete opposite of the former’s non-existent familial ties, who extends a loving hand to her sister receives just as much torment, despite still being called to sort her hair.
As the relationship between the pair is grown, observed in pure naturalistic style by Leigh, a character who could so easily turn an entire audience away, and does, manages to find a spark of connection. Past hardship brings context to her lingering anger and despair, excellently conveyed by Jean-Baptiste in a powerhouse performance packed with held-in and disguised emotion; a far call from her brilliant turn in Leigh’s Secrets And Lies back in 1997. Between Pansy and Chantelle there are not only two different lives, but two different ways of coping with life and expressing emotions. It leads to a fantastically tender scene between the pair where the real confrontation with the past, and its effects in the present, come to the fore for the audience, and in words for the pair.
Emotion hangs thicker in later scenes as more and more builds up, we know just how much characters are dealing with and the multiple thoughts, and personal hard truths, that their hiding alongside what they’re presenting to everyone else. Fear, sadness, anxiety, hesitation and isolation are all confined to one room. Every character’s mind and face are a portrait of feelings, all combining into the dark tangle which starts to cloud up the room. It’s all excellently built up by Leigh and his performers who create a story of real human emotion mixed with personal conflict and uncertainty. “They all hate me” cries Pansy, she includes herself in that group.
While she starts off bringing plenty of laughs, it’s not the continuing humour which connects us to Pansy, it’s the opposite. The reason she turns a shoulder to the rest of the world and feels constantly restless. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is sensational, while Michele Austin delivers a lighter, understanding performance of compassion. It stirs the details of revelations and reactions between the two sisters, and indeed the rest of their family. There’s plenty to already have an effect in the film’s first half, but the second half reveals new layers and details to truly deliver a knockout which acts as one of Leigh’s best films. One which for the characters lives up to the honesty of its name and for the audience live sup to the fascination it creates.
Fuelled by a set of brilliant performances, especially a superb Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths offers a human portrait of unspoken emotions and the ways in which people behave in the wake of them, creating punches of humour, emotion and pain through its honesty.
Just A Little Bit Random 