Hard Truths Review: LFF 2024
Marianne Jean-Baptiste wages war on the world in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a deeply unpleasant woman. An agoraphobic, germophobic hypochondriac she barely leaves her meticulously clean house and insists her family keep to her ridiculously high standards. Pansy regularly berates her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and layabout son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) who she insists is wasting his life. When she does go out, she gets into fights with every single person she encounters; from her doctor, to her dentist, to random people in the supermarket. Her’s is not a happy existence.
By contrast her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) enjoys life. She runs a successful hair salon where she has a good rapport with her loyal customers. She has a good relationship with her two adult daughters who still live at home, the three of them constantly laugh and joke together.
When Chantelle forces Pansy to accompany her to the cemetery to visit their mothers grave the two sisters get into an argument, and Chantelle becomes concerned about just how poor Pansy’s mental health is. The situation only escalates over a family dinner, and Pansy seems to be completely shutting down.
Hard Truths is the twenty first feature film from the legendary Mike Leigh, a writer and director whose process remains pretty unique within the film industry. As with near all of his previous work he started out with only a concept of a story before assembling his actors and coming up with a script based on weeks of group workshopping and their own improvisations. He’s compared his filmmaking process to being like a novelist or painter – it’s only by interacting with his materials that he can decide on a story, and he figures out what the film will be while making it.
Both Jean-Baptiste and Austin are frequent collaborators with Leigh and have actually played sisters in one of his stage plays before, so their performances feel incredibly natural and lived in. They craft complex characters, Chantelle as warm and attractive as Pansy is spiky and cold. Jean-Baptiste in particular is incredibly fierce but also incredibly funny, her arguments with poor unsuspecting members of the public prompting some real laugh out loud moments. Pansy is a familiar person that any of us could have encountered in the wild, and you just know she is absolutely exhausting to be around.
The brilliance of Hard Truths is in recognising how the ripples of the two leads behaviour have spread out to all around them. The women’s homes and families are exact reflections of the energy they put out into the world and nowhere else is this more obvious than in the behaviour and prospects of their children. No one needs to vocalise why on earth Moses might be emotionally crippled, while his cousins are so outgoing and successful – the answer is right there in the room for all to see, even if it goes unacknowledged.
Hard Truths is another carefully considered, character driven slice of life from Mike Leigh. A story where nothing really happens and yet you learn everything you need to know about the family at its centre. Powered by an absolutely electrifying central performance from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, it’s a hugely enjoyable project from these long-time collaborators.
Hard Truths is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Hard Truths will be released in UK cinemas on 31st January 2025
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