Take A Chance On Love: Mike Leigh Delivers A Late Career Powerhouse
You can’t help but wonder if Mike Leigh is making a sly joke by naming Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s ferociously angry, deeply bitter, anxiety-ridden, and devastatingly depressed character Pansy Deacon. A priestly flower, she isn’t. But Hard Truths, a late career stunner from Leigh, plants Pansy and her impenetrable exterior in tough, rich soil, and patiently brings her into miraculous bloom.
A tortured tornado, Pansy spews acidic invective to anyone in her radius, family and strangers alike. Friends would endure the same if she had any. Everyone is wearing too much makeup, disgracing themselves by what they wear, acting shamefully, wasting energy, and most crucially, not living up to the expectations Pansy has for them. And even if they did, she would find fault anyway. Her daily and unrelenting diatribes has created a homelife in which her contractor husband Curtley (David Webber) and unemployed and dour 22-year-old-son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) move about the house as ghosts. Pansy’s volatile anger is matched by an irrational fear of the natural world: plants, birds, foxes, and even the barren backyard. They are carriers of germs and disease. Thus the house she keeps is spotlessly, psychotically clean. Everything is in its place, but speaking with greater volume is what isn’t there. There are no family pictures or art on the walls, nor shelves of books. This is a house void of life.
However, the trick in Leigh’s delicately configured film is that outside the Deacon household, vitality is in abundance. The sun shines brightest in the home of Chantal (Michele Austin), Pansy’s sister, who is her opposite in almost every way. A single parent to two bubbly and affectionate daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson), she’s a hairdresser whose warm ray of light extends to her customers. Chantal’s family acts as a conduit in Leigh’s clever screenplay to create a bustling portrait of the British African-Caribbean community in North London. We get a window into the worlds of Aleisha and Kayla, and their jobs at a cosmetic company and in a law firm, both of which indicate a desire to make the world a little bit better (Aleisha pitches a coconut-free cream for customers with delicate skin). Thus it’s no surprise that as much as Pansy’s anger has created an isolation and loneliness she recognizes but can’t fix, Chantal loves Pansy unconditionally, and in turn, her daughters mirror her efforts to pull Pansy, Curtley, and Moses into their lives.
What starts as a frequently and unexpectedly funny look at a woman at war with the world, slowly morphs into a moving study of someone grappling with grief, a marriage mired in meanness, and a crushing halo of sadness that can’t be overcome. “I’m tired,” Pansy says, more than once, admitting she simply doesn’t know what to do to end her howling emotional pain. Pany’s mental anguish also affects her physically — her jaws ache, her bowels are clenched, and she just wants to sleep. If she didn’t wake up, there’s the sense she’d feel it was a blessing. A fractious relationship with her deceased mother offers some explanation, but Leigh thankfully doesn’t make her lingering trauma an easy rationalization. Pansy’s unhappiness is also of her own doing, but Curtley’s too, as he has simply given up trying to figure out how to ease his wife’s suffering. At the same time, he’s just as much of a victim caught in Pansy’s crosshairs.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s boiling, furious, and utterly brilliant performance is the whirling center of the picture. Yet for all her energy, Hard Truths remains unhurried, building itself around the Deacon family and everyone they touch. Lensed by Leigh regular Dick Pope, the digital photography is restrained and unfussy, contrasting the work Jean-Baptiste unfurls in front of the camera. Pope and Leigh know the actress is giving them a gift and get out of her way. If only the people Pansy encounters could do that same.
“You can’t buy time, you can’t sell it either” is an observation that’s floated in Hard Truths. Indeed, time is all we have to find love, appreciate family, and pursue our dreams. But life has a way of pressing down on our hearts, deepening our hurts, and occasionally sticking us in a rut that for some, like Pansy, doesn’t offer an exit except to scream. But as Leigh brings his remarkable film, if not to a resolution, then a grace note, he contends that leaving your heart open to those who might need it, might be time well spent.
Reviewed on September 8th at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival – Special Presentations Programme. 97 Minutes.
★★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
