From Feb. 21-24, Albuquerque’s Guild Cinema showed British director Mike Leigh’s new film “Hard Truths.”
The film centers around Pansy, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, a middle-aged woman living with unnamed chronic illnesses and grappling with severe agoraphobia. She frequently lashes out against her plumber husband and unemployed adult son, both of whom she deems to be useless.
Pansy’s sister Chantelle, played by Michele Austin, is cheerful and approaches her life with reasonable optimism. Chantelle is a single mother with two adult daughters, all of whom more or less have their lives together. In this way, the two households could not be more different.
Over the past several decades, Leigh has established himself as one of the most renowned art filmmakers in the United Kingdom. His films routinely focus on working-class Brits and their tragic yet hilariously dysfunctional families.
One of his most notable films is 1996’s “Secrets & Lies,” which won the Palme d’Or — the top prize — at the Cannes Film Festival. “Secrets & Lies” also stars Jean-Baptiste, as well as Austin in a brief supporting role.
In “Secrets & Lies,” Jean-Baptiste plays an optometrist who, upon the death of her adoptive mother, finds out that her birth mother is a white woman. The two reconnect, and much familial chaos ensues. While the earlier film is certainly progressive in terms of its depiction of a Black British woman in the 1990s, it nevertheless focuses on mostly white characters.
“Hard Truths” explores similar themes, such as the alienation that one can feel in one’s own family, but with a Black family at its center.
While Pansy is the main character of “Hard Truths,” Jean-Baptiste’s towering, fearless performance leaves no doubt for whose film this is. She bares her soul on screen in a way that very few other actors are capable of doing. In Pansy’s ruthless diatribes that she hurls at her family members and customer service workers alike, her misguided hatred and witty observations arise in the same breath, thanks to Jean-Baptiste’s multifaceted screen presence.
Slowly but surely, Pansy’s hardened facade begins to drop, and as it does, Jean-Baptiste brings immense pathos to the character. It is frequently hard to agree with Pansy’s cruel actions, yet she is always someone to empathize with. Everyone has been in her position, and while she certainly takes it to extremes, Jean-Baptiste makes it impossible to ignore the real-life circumstances that have molded Pansy into the person she is today.
Leigh is quite renowned for his filmmaking process, which involves months of rehearsals with the principal cast wherein they develop their characters alongside their director and one another. While some improvisation happens during filming, the vast majority of the film’s dialogue has been developed in rehearsal.
Jean-Baptiste further outlined the process of making a Mike Leigh film in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“We spend so much time working on these characters and establishing their habits and things like that, so that when you come to improvise you’re coming in fully loaded. It’s not like you’re on the fly trying to think stuff up. That thought process has been locked from the word ‘go,’” Jean-Baptiste told the LA Times.
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Through Leigh’s unorthodox filmmaking method, what might ordinarily be two-dimensional characters become so realistic that one forgets that they are fictional characters. Perhaps that is because, in part, they are real people. They are our neighbors, coworkers, friends and strangers that pass us on the street.
“Hard Truths” is a perfect depiction of the loneliness and apathy that permeates our post-pandemic, politically fraught world. It seems as if so many of us are like Pansy: isolated, angry and afraid to reach out. But once we do — once we break down that wall — our world just might change for the better.
Elijah Ritch is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. They can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on X @dailylobo
