Hard Truths (12A)

Pansy lives with her henpecked plumber husband Curtley and unemployed adult son Moses, both of whom are easy targets for her percolating rage. They suffer her tirades in melancholic silence. In stark contrast, Pansy's sister Chantelle is a warm and outgoing hairdresser and single mother, who cheerfully embraces noise and mess as she raises daughters Aleisha and Kayla. A Mother's Day celebration unites two branches of the family under one roof and sparks fly.

LondonNet Film Review

Hard Truths (12A) Film Review from LondonNet

Writer-director Mike Leigh’s fascination with the misery and bile-speckled mirth of human nature comes full circle from his pithily titled 1971 directorial debut, Bleak Moments, about a socially awkward secretary who cares for her sister. In Hard Truths, the 81-year-old filmmaker once again focuses on the relationship between siblings and fashions, potentially, his most unsympathetic and unlikable character: a 50-something mother and wife in the suffocating grip of depression that causes her, with the slightest provocation, to vociferously lash out at everyone around her…

She rages against charity workers, who proposition strangers outside stations and supermarkets (“Cheerful, grinning people, I can’t stand ‘em!”), clothes for infants (“What’s a baby got pockets for?”) and her own GP, who leaves his patients in the capable hands of a colleague while he attends the funeral of a close relative (“Why’s he bothering with the dead when he’s got the living suffering here?”) A barnstorming lead performance from Marianne Jean-Baptiste electrifies every frame of Leigh’s brutal and unsparing London-set tragi-comedy and tests the limits of our compassion and understanding.

Her onscreen alter ego is monstrous, callous, insensitive and almost intolerable – an unfiltered mouthpiece for frustrations of the modern world who says what she thinks and damn the consequences – yet by the film’s conclusion, she is also painfully vulnerable. In arguably the film’s most touching scene, the venomous harridan accepts comfort at a graveside from her sibling: “I don’t understand you, but I love you.” We can relate to that uncomfortably conflicted sentiment.

Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) lives with her henpecked plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and unemployed adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), both of whom are easy targets for her percolating rage. They suffer her tirades in melancholic silence. In stark contrast, Pansy’s sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is a warm and outgoing hairdresser and single mother, who cheerfully embraces noise and mess as she raises daughters Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson).

These sisters are bubbly, quick-witted and go-getters: Aleisha is a lawyer and Kayla works for a cosmetics company under a disparaging boss (Samantha Spiro) who rejects her pitch of a coconut-free formulation (“It’s a non-starter”). A Mother’s Day celebration unites two branches of the family under one roof and sparks fly.

Carefully shaped in improvised workshops between director and cast before cameras rolled, Hard Truths is dominated by Jean-Baptiste’s anguished matriarch and her incendiary outbursts. She confidently surfs tidal waves of splenetic dialogue, pausing for breath to allow other cast to quietly make their marks. The script hints at intergenerational trauma as the root of Pansy’s suffering, but like many of Leigh’s films, nagging questions are unanswered.

– Kim Hu