In Hard Truths, Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is checking out of a supermarket in suburban London when she suddenly attacks the cashier (Ashna Rabheru): “Look at you! Fix your face! You’re dealing with the public, handling people’s food! You should be ashamed looking like that!” When the women behind her in the checkout line object to her unprovoked assault on an employee who has been quietly doing her job, Pansy rounds on them, calling one of the women a whore and the other one an ugly bitch. Meanwhile, the cashier cracks a smile because the customers have drawn the heat away from her. When Pansy gets home, she takes out her frustration on her husband (David Webber): “I have been assaulted and harassed by people all day!”
It is a tribute to Jean-Baptiste that we are willing to spend the better part of this 97-minute film in the company of someone who is this determined to be miserable. This actress came to our attention 28 years ago when she got an Oscar nomination for Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, and she more than deserves to receive a second one for this film that reunites her with Leigh. It opens this week at a few Tarrant County theaters.
Leigh’s films often include a character who is angry at the world for reasons that elude their own understanding — think of Eddie Marsan’s spitting mad driving instructor in Happy-Go-Lucky or Imelda Staunton’s insomnia-haunted patient in Another Year. However, here he puts the angry person front and center of his narrative, such as it is. Story, after all, has never been an integral part of the British master’s filmmaking. He’s more about setting his camera down with his characters and observing what they do in the course of their everyday lives.
Thus we see how scared Pansy is underneath all her anger. She refuses to visit her sister (Michele Austin) because she’s afraid of catching germs from the bugs on her houseplants or from her nieces who don’t bathe often enough for her liking and dress like sluts, in her estimation. Pansy’s husband and their adult son (Tuwaine Barrett) have been thoroughly emasculated by her constant carping, and they yearn for her bouts of depression that leave her in bed for days at a time. When they try to rouse her from bed, she screams in terror. She has altercations with a young Black couple in a furniture store (“Do you think I want to buy a couch with your bloody DNA all over it?”) and an older man in a parking lot (Gary Beadle), who curses at her because she’s just sitting in her car while he’s driving around looking for a space. In response, she calls him a rapist. This woman needs therapy worse than just about any movie character I’ve seen recently. Were she in America, she’d be punched in the face by a passer-by or thrown to the pavement by the police. You won’t be surprised to find out that Pansy hates cops, too.
The sheer force of vitriol that Jean-Baptiste brings to the role is formidable, but that’s the part that’s relatively easy to play. What keeps Pansy from being some one-dimensional harpy is the deep well of self-loathing that Jean-Baptiste manages to project. It’s an indictment of the British film industry that they have not been able to put this actress to better use in the years since Secrets & Lies. (She spent seven seasons on American TV, delivering dry exposition on Without a Trace.) Through her, Hard Truths confronts you with the reality that people like this exist in our world and challenges us with what we might do if we were unlucky enough to run across such a person. The film concludes with her husband in her living room, needing her help after hurting his back moving furniture. She sits in her bedroom, unable to move. The discontented look on her face speaks volumes.
Hard Truths
Starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin. Written and directed by Mike Leigh. Rated R.
