After Mike Leigh’s latest feature, Hard Truths, was rejected by Cannes and Venice, Leigh and his company “thought we’d made a rubbish film.” Thankfully, Hard Truths landed in Toronto late last summer and earned the plaudits it was denied in France and Italy. Why was Hard Truths outright rejected by festivals who’ve hosted Leigh before, and, in the case of Cannes, honored him with their top prize? Leigh’s Secrets & Lies won the Palme d’Or in 1996, and it was in that film that Marianne Jean-Baptiste made her proper cinema debut after a few appearances in short films in the early-1990s. She’s back as the lead in Hard Truths nearly 30 years after the triumph of Secrets & Lies and her own nomination at the 1997 Oscars for Best Supporting Actress.
Secrets & Lies is a fine movie, but too long and uncomplicated to leave an impression—in other words, exactly the kind of movie that tends to win Oscars and top prizes at all the major European festivals. Hard Truths doesn’t honor liberal delusions or cater to the new political correctness of the last decade: I can imagine plenty of people in power at Cannes and Venice balking at featuring a film starring such a cranky, miserable, and hostile black woman. These liberals are almost all venomous racists, but the repression is so deep that pressure valves emerge in odd places (how else to explain the industry’s embrace of Emilia Perez? I think it’s a not-so-subtle “Fuck You” to everyone who cares more about “representation” and ethnic and gender quotas than entertainment and art for art’s sake). A liberal will embrace and emphasize noxious “magical negro” stereotypes, and they’ll languish in black misery message movies like Nickel Boys, but they can’t stand to see black people as people—in other words, just like them.
Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy is hilariously rude to EVERYONE, and the first half of Hard Truths plays a bit like Leigh’s version of Curb Your Enthusiasm: “I saw her baby, it was wearing a jumper with pockets. What does a baby need pockets for? What’s going in there?” Holding up the line at a grocery store, she tells the woman behind her to wait and “stop looking at me like an ostrich.” She shows up to the dentist, but her regular doctor is away for a funeral. “Doesn’t he know I’m more important? He should’ve let me know.” Pansy’s miserable, and Leigh never explicitly tells us why (there was no mystery in Secrets & Lies); he doesn’t tell us because he doesn’t need to. Hard Truths goes from the funniest movie of the year to the saddest about an hour in, and the comedown from the comedy of that first section makes the sadness of the end so much more powerful than had the movie begun with exactly the kind of black misery messaging that’s ruined movies for over a decade now.
Pansy isn’t nice, she’s not happy, and why should she be? She doesn’t love her husband, her son is a mute disappointment, her family hates her, and she hates herself. There’s no relief, and in this way Hard Truths most resembles Leigh’s first television film, 1973’s Hard Labour. Liz Smith takes all the abuse the world has for her in Hard Labour, but in Hard Truths, Pansy gets a head start lacerating everyone and everything around her before they have any opportunity to do anything to her—love her, hate her, whatever. She doesn’t want to continue, she doesn’t want to live: “I’m so tired… I just want to close my eyes… I just want to stop.” Everyone’s been frustrated at the grocery store or the doctor’s office or the department store, just as everyone has reached their breaking point, or whatever they thought their breaking point was. Leigh’s film stuns precisely because it’s such an accurate depiction of daily life, whether you live in London or Louisiana.
Disappointment, regret, resentment, anger, hostility, and selfishness without clear “punishment.” Pansy’s one of the most “unlikable” characters in recent cinema, so it’s no surprise that Hard Truths makes liberals and dilettantes enormously uncomfortable. Good thing Toronto and Bleecker Street saved the day and brought Leigh’s film to North America, where we can see for ourselves it’s the furthest thing from rubbish there is in theaters right now.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith