TIFF '24: “Hard Truths” hits hard

by Cláudio Alves

It's been six years since cinemas have been left waiting for a new Mike Leigh film. Moreover, the British portraitist of working-class life and struggle, joy and pain, secrets and lies, had for a while abandoned the contemporary stories upon which his early career was built. Though the director's forays into historical pasts have produced naught but great cinema, it's fair to say it's been over six years since the world has encountered what most associate with the words "a Mike Leigh film." Well, the wait is over, and I'm pleased to say Hard Truths is well worth the wait.

Not so much a return to form as a return to familiarity, the film also finds the auteur reuniting with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the Oscar-nominated star of his Palme d'Or victor who also scored the director's Career Girls. And if what Leigh delivers behind the camera could be called a triumph, what his leading lady accomplishes demands a stronger word. She's the stuff of legend and what actressing dreams are made of…

Hard Truths opens with a simple enough shot. The camera regards a house, perfectly proper and pristine, white paint and suburban polish for all to see. Yet, it lingers, more than strictly comfortable. On an elementary level, one might assume Leigh is merely providing a background for Gary Yershon's overture, unrolling the credits before the show can start in full. In retrospect, however, the suspended shot feels almost reluctant to cross the road and enter. A sister shot at the story's closure, a bookend of sorts, only underlines this notion. By then, what seemed commonplace, near anonymous, will be laden with such weight you almost feel dragged down, crushed. 

Not that the film is going that way immediately. Though aptly titled and bursting at the seams with blunt dictums, Hard Truths is a wily little film. It sneaks up on you. At first, you'll be apologized for thinking you're watching Leigh at his most defiantly comical. He's keen on igniting laughter throughout the audience like a madman conductor, the public his orchestra of loud mirth. And who can blame the spectator for falling into the pleasantness of comedy? In other artists' hands, the family inside could have been flattened into clown business, a sitcom with the stereotype of an "an angry Black woman" front and center. 

She's Pansy, a woman consumed with unending wrath who'll lash out at the slightest provocation. Neither Leigh nor Jean-Baptiste hold back in showing the extent of this woman's hypersensitivity and the fury with which she'll react to all, from stranger to son. He's a meek one, that Moses, trapped in perpetual adolescence at twenty-two and forever cowed under the bitterness of his mother. Every aspect of him is scrutinized, criticized, vivisected, and you can't help but imagine what it must have been like to grow up like that. Her husband, Curtley, received a similar treatment on the regular and seem used to it. At this point, it's just another fact of life. 

Everyone who's in Pansy's vicinity seems to have accepted her prickliness, or given up on resisting against its power. The nastiness is often funny, and so are the reactions of the poor stranger who comes across the woman without past encounters having calloused their psyches to better whitstand her prickle. She's like an insult comic in a social realist framing, her voice caught in a perpetual shout, projecting poison to the cheap seats. Considering Leigh's rehearsal-based process, much of it must have come from Jean-Baptiste herself, a fantastic high-wire act that balances humor and the character's incandescent anger without missing a step.

When she does, it's deliberate and illuminating, a slip of self-awareness that'll be all too familiar to whomever has struggled or loved those struggling with mental illness. It's that flash when, all of a sudden, you can see yourself from outside and seem to balk at what's perceived. However, it's not enough to stop. It's impossible to stop the freight train coming out of your mouth and heaven help those in its path. A disconcerting experience, it can be just a tremble at the corner of the mouth for those witnessing the sorry spectacle. Glimpsing the outside, it's as if the self becomes a prison, the body a straightjacket, and the mouth an out-of-control automaton.

Like the snowflake that starts the avalanche, the initial slip sets the stage for what will eventually break the film in two. Like in many a Mike Leigh film, it happens at a family gathering, a Mother's Day lunch to mark five years since Pansy's mother passed. There and then, it all comes out, the anger married to the pain, the constant ache that comes in physical and mental form, the scars of a parentified childhood, the fire that consumes everything and makes enjoying life impossible. Hell, living life is already near unmanageable. But there's more, for Pansy feels her scorn reflected, saying she doesn't care for her son yet hurting under the assumption he hates her. Under the assumption that everyone does.

It culminates in a ragged laugh that soon turns to sobs, a shocking scene that contradicts whatever reductive image one might have of Pansy, yet doesn't serve as an absolution or a cure. Hard Truths lives up to its title. There's no pat solution to be found, no closure, and no easy ways to assign moral judgment to the many characters involved. Leigh could never be so prescriptive, and neither could his actors. Which are many, even if this text might make it sound like the Marianne Jean-Baptiste one woman show. In fact, plenty of the film's best moments expand the narrative's scope to show the various branches of this Caribbean-British family, making for something closer to collective portraiture than an individual character study. 

As Curtley and Moses, David Webber and Tuwaine Barrett are often slotted into reactive roles in the scenes shared with Jean-Baptiste, but their saturnine silences are rich in detail. Michele Austin is even more impressive as Chantal, Pansy's sister, whose cheerful demeanor strikes a mighty contrast to the older woman's hostility. The Mother's Day sequence wouldn't work without her articulating Chantal's bond and support for Pansy, her lucidity, a flash of defiance, a sympathetic surge of her own outrage. Even the most minor one-scene players deliver astutely observed work, often in a highly demonstrative register that should have become insufferable but somehow doesn't. Somehow, Leigh and his actors never fall into such traps. So, honesty prevails, even when its intensity starts to bruise. 

It should be said, that no matter some eleventh-hour larks, Hard Truths can be hard to watch past its more comedic and exploratory first half. I admit I felt myself shattered by the shockwaves of its final scenes, leaving the theater in the glow of great cinema yet soon feeling a wetness on my cheek. Perchance it's a matter of recognition and what it implies, what it reveals. And it does so with relative simplicity, a final contrast of public and private spaces. We go out to the house, on the outside again, but return to the three inhabitants separated within, needing another but unable to reach out. Paralyzed, they're alone and in agony, three impenetrable fortresses collapsing into themselves. Like Jean-Baptiste's Pansy, we have no choice but to cackle until we cry.

Comments

[thevoid99]

I heard this is the exact opposite of Happy Go Lucky. I love Mike Leigh though I still need to see Peterloo and his earlier films.