There’s no such thing as hate

Just acts of fear and love

– Soft Play, Acts of Fear and Love

In 1997, for her role in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996), actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Now, about 30 years later, there’s no Oscar buzz with Hard Truths (2024), but Jean-Baptiste returns as a real force of (human) nature, in a performance so stirring that it’s perhaps twice as deserving of any award. 

Following not entirely her own trials and tribulations, but rather those that her misery is imposing on others, at the hardened heart of Leigh’s newest work lies a difficult Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) – a kind of antipode to another of the British auteur’s flower-named protagonists, the affable eternal optimist Poppy in Happy Go Lucky (2008) (For some added parallelism, it’s worth noting that Jean-Baptiste’s character in Secrets & Lies had a similarly flower themed name, Hortense). Pansy is much the eternal pessimist, quick to provoke every cashier for not returning a smile and even quicker to start the most useless of arguments in busy parking lots. To this Londonian matriarch everyone is ill-meaning, and she is ill-meaning in return, going to great lengths to berate her own son and husband at the dinner table, while they sit in silence, tired and numbed by the ever so constant complaints and vitriol. If they’re not all “useless”, then they’re “conniving”, to the point that Pansy struggles leaving the house out of the conviction that everyone is just intent on agitating and hurting her. Her only trustworthy ally seems her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), who’s nonetheless still subjected to snide “you never call” accusations despite her evident warmness and concern.

Leigh makes us pendulate between compassion and contempt for the woman, between being alienated by her utter voraciousness and recognising the glimmer of humanity that shines amidst it. Jean-Baptiste’s genius of gesture and nuance adds to this duality; Pansy’s stuntedness seems both combative and vulnerable, and her laughter easily turns into heart-wrenching cries of loneliness and sorrow.

Jean-Baptiste imbues Pansy with such intensity that at times her continuous world-hating is outright hilarious; her mordant remarks about the pointlessness of pockets on baby outfits and a doctor so young that she reminds her of a “squeaking mouse” provide for some classical Leigh-style moments of mean, bleak humour. But as harsh and unlikeable as she comes across, the protagonist in Hard Truths is much more than a kind of gratuitously angry Karen that’s one dimensionally in the wrong and one dimensionally malicious. Pansy frequently wakes up screaming and wails in pain. “I’m a sick woman” she insists time and again, retiring on every occasion under the duvet of her bedroom. Her curtains are always drawn closed, and she won’t even dare step into the garden, or inside an elevator. 

We’re never led to understand what this sickness is. In part, it could be an invention caused by hypochondria. At times, it even feels like a get-out-of-jail card that allows her to be hateful. It most likely is a state of generalised anxiety, depression and trauma that has been wearing the woman down over the years. As her sister asks her, why can’t she enjoy life, and she screams back “I don’t know”, we see the real depth of despair, a blunt discouragement and confusion, a paralysis of sorts in the face of life. As perhaps do Pansy’s relatives themselves, Leigh makes us pendulate between compassion and contempt for the woman, between being alienated by her utter voraciousness and recognising the glimmer of humanity that shines amidst it. Jean-Baptiste’s genius of gesture and nuance adds to this duality; Pansy’s stuntedness seems both combative and vulnerable, and her laughter easily turns into heart-wrenching cries of loneliness and sorrow. She is a sum of angering and pitiable contradictions, as are Leigh’s most memorable characters. 

Mike Leigh’s films have always been populated by terribly magnetic characters but unlikable people: the kind of everyday monsters who are monsters by no other account than the fact that they are human. Of course, some of them are worse than the others, like the vicious Johnny in Naked (1993) or the En-ra-ha paranoiac in Happy-Go-Lucky. But take the useless fathers, the lying mothers, the angry children, the insistent relatives, the weird friend. There’s rarely a saint in Leigh’s cinema as there are no saints in real life. They are never antagonists, but individuals at their most human: imperfect, dark, spiteful, guilty, dishonest, consumed by a mundane monstrosity that exists in each and every one of us and comes out when we’re fearful and vulnerable, often hurting the others in the process. This doesn’t mean they are devoid of kindness and love, that always exists beneath the surface and in the most unexpected and awkward of gestures, but comes out slowly – just like how Pansy’s laze-around son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) remembers to buy flowers for Mother’s Day. They’re your sad-looking, plastic-packaged supermarket flowers, so prosaic and so normal, but it is this triviality that moves, echoing the moments in our lives when we had to buy the supermarket flowers.

Leigh picks up on these particularly banal gestures of human interaction more as an anthropologist than as realist – they’re the system of mundane rules and coded gesticulations that make up life. The spaces inhabited by Leigh’s characters have always felt round and alive, filled with telling trinkets and unremarkable clutter of existence: an untidy room or a fancy couch, a shabby restaurant or a busy artist’s room. Leigh does not operate with mere observations that offer authenticity of place and character, he offers significance through familiarity. For a filmmaker who hasn’t done a film set in the present day for roughly 15 years, it’s rather striking how well Leigh is able to feel a spirit of its times. Whether it’s the subtle talk about COVID, the uber 21st century office jobs of Chantelle’s two daughters or the middle-class greige that dons Pansy’s compulsively clean London house, Hard Truths creates a very dense portrait of the present, one that builds up from the most casual of details. If for some directors of his generation the digital always feels a bit out of place if not gauche, Leigh’s deep focus and high definition shots add to a touch of coldness that seems to dominate Pansy’s home but also modern, 2020s life.

Inevitably, like most of Leigh’s stories, Hard Truth does not end on a humanistically positive note; there’s no grand, illuminating change that our heroes have gone through while the future looks brighter. It ends on a human note, instead, with the fear that these characters are going to remain as desperate and as awful to each other as time goes on. What animates us is just the faintest hope that, as the camera draws away, Pansy may get out of her bedroom and go down to her husband to help him with his pain. We will not know but we hope it, as we hope, from the bottom of our hearts, that someone will still find it in their souls to love us when we’re at our worst. 

Hard Truth is not necessarily Mike Leigh’s most memorable work, but it is a fantastic character study about how illness sours the heart – J. Hoberman was very fair to point out Leigh’s Dickensian fashions. It may also be one of the few films in recent times to actually be able to draw out pure emotion: it stirs something deep inside so scary and so deeply human, it warns against what we could become and what we already are. We may not like to admit it, but that’s the tragedy of Pansy – it is so easy to become her.

P.S: I’ll use to occasion to point out that Mike Leigh was one of the two filmmakers to put The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) on his 2022 Sight and Sound Best Films of All Time list.

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.