Hard Truths is the work of a master operating at full capacity. Like most of Mike Leigh’s other films it revolves around a collection of lower-middle class characters. In this case, we’re presented with a pair of sisters, Pansy, played by Marianne-Jean Baptiste of Secrets and Lies, and Chantelle, played by Michele Austin. Pansy lives with her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber, and her 22-year old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who is struggling to find a place for himself in the world. Chantelle is single, works as a hairdresser and lives with her daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson), who is trying to develop a brand in cosmetics, and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), who has started seeing a new man. Although the focus is primarily on Pansy and Chantelle, Leigh’s screenplay beautifully captures the overarching dynamics of this family and the way it is mediated by and in turn mediates the relationship between the two sisters.
More specifically, Pansy and Chantelle both represent two quite different outlooks on aging. Pansy is a pessimist and a narcissist, alternating between berating her husband, son and the general public, and retreating into a soporific, depressive stupor. Chantelle, by contrast, is an optimist and an empath, continually attempting to draw Pansy out of her cocoon and bring her back in contact with the wider world. One of Leigh’s great talents as a film-maker is his ability to pair the formal elegance of theatre and the schematic qualities of philosophy with a distinct and light cinematic touch. Here, he presents the sisters as a dialectic between these two approaches to aging – optimistic and pessimistic – and ends just before they are resolved into a new synthesis. You sense this synthesis from the outset though, since both Chantelle and Pansy, in their very different ways, are stoic and determined above all else; despite their very different outlooks on life they both understand the importance of simply keeping on. It is here that you start to feel Leigh’s personal connection to the film as an eighty-three year old director. Time in Hard Truths is a wearying and exhausting thing, and even the most extreme pessimism or optimism are mere alternative ways of coming to terms with that fact.
While both of the women are memorable, Pansy’s powerhouse performance is at the centre of the screenplay. Through her, Leigh paints a remarkable portrait of how character traits and a tendency towards negativity can become utterly entrenched in older age. It’s fascinating to watch her become more and more entrenched over the course of the first act, producing a compelling sense of how it feels to be trapped in your own body and your own life. Pansy’s house acts as a cipher for both of these things – it’s never clean enough for her liking and she can never secure it enough against the outside world and yet it also traps her, leaving her with nowhere to retreat to but beneath the covers of her bed. She belongs to a generation who didn’t have the vocabulary to deal with mental illness, meaning that all her pathologies have calcified amidst old age, to the point that they almost entirely comprise her character.
Over the first half of the film, Leigh charts this intensifying intractability and calcification in all its modulations and permutations. Pansy starts off with a series of escalating diatribes directed at her husband and son, her sister, a worker at a furniture store and another customer at the supermarket. These diatribes take on a different inflection when she visits the doctor and dentist, partly because she is forced into a prone position, where she quivers on the verge of giving up completely and sinking into a depressive stupor, her whole body rallying to preserve its autonomy even if this means attacking her healthcare providers at every turn. Gradually, we learn that this is the week preceding the five-year anniversary of her mother’s death, and that her bursts of rage occur in counterpoint to Chantelle’s repeated invitations to accompany her to the cemetery so that they can pay their respects together.
Pansy does accompany Chantelle and at this pivotal moment her diatribes collapse in on themselves, sinking her into a deep depression from which she is only able to summon fragmented, general, disoriented observations about her state of mind: “Why can’t you just enjoy life?” “I don’t know…haunted, haunted.” Her refrain is “I just want it all to stop.” Finally, when Moses giver her flowers for Mother’s Day, she goes through an extraordinary series of modulations: her face quivers as if she’s about to begin laughing, then sobs start to rack her body and finally she shudders and heaves with trauma as it comes to the surface. Then, she sinks back into an even deeper silence, leading Chantelle to insist that she do something, anything, to break out of her narcissism and depression – even if it means leaving her family. We also find out, in bits and pieces, that Pansy’s personality stems partly from her relationship with her mother, although by this stage it has become so embedded the cause barely matters.
This brings us to the crisis of the film and the moment at which Leigh’s dialectic reaches its possible point of synthesis. While hauling a bath down a staircase, Pansy’s husband Curtley injures his back. His assistant Virgil, played by Jonathan Livingstone, helps him get home, and deposits him in the kitchen, before going upstairs to tell Pansy what has happened. Sitting at the dining room table, and unable to move for fear of the already unbearable pain intensifying, Curtley is suddenly as trapped in his own body and in his own life as Pansy. The question is whether Pansy will be able to break out of her own narcissism and out of her own life to help him. When Virgil enters her room she’s curled up in bed as always and although she responds aggressively and paranoically to his explanation of what has happened, she doesn’t get straight back beneath the covers. Instead, she pauses, waits, hesitates, and the film ends at this moment, not quite bridging the gap between her pessimism and Chantelle’s optimism but not ruling out that the two forms of endurance might achieve a synthesis either.
In the end, both approaches are responses to the same thing: the onslaught of time. In that respect, Virgil is less a character than a chorus, peppering his conversations with Kurtley with parables and anecdotes about the nature of time. Two stand out in particular – one about a woman who “sold” time in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by setting her clock to Big Ben and then charging people to disclose the time of day to them; one about Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony, whose second movement includes a pervasive “ticking” motif. Between these two images of the inexorability and materiality of time, the film affirms the possibility that we might take everything that our lives seem to have excluded and dialectically incorporate it into them – and that even if this occurs in the final moments or seconds of a crisis, this is time well spent. It’s not a dissimilar message and structure to Happy-Go-Lucky but it takes on a more burnished, more melancholy and stoic register here, as if the passage of time itself has rendered Leigh more resilient and focused about how we can all endure it.