Nancy Savoca (‘Household Saints,’ ‘Dogfight’)
Watching “Hard Truths“:
I fell in love with the star of Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” Marianne Jean-Baptiste, in her debut work, Secrets & Lies (also directed by Mike Leigh). Seeing her performance there led me to cast her for our own movie together, “The 24 Hour Woman.”
While I know Marianne is a terrific talent, nothing prepared me for the experience I had with this film. Marianne plays Pansy, a stomping, snapping, furious woman – wife, mother, sister – who is stumbling through a life that she can barely manage. She is a middle-class, middle-aged, Afro- Caribbean British woman (her voice has the beautiful lilt when she gets passionate) and there is neither explanation nor apology for why she is the way she is. To watch her is excruciatingly painful as well as hilariously funny. Yes – both. Sometimes at the same time.
The film fan in me walked away after the screening wanting to put the film in a time capsule labelled ‘2024’. It is a movie for our times.
And the filmmaker in me wanted to unpack the incredible work done by the director and actors and crew. I don’t have the time capsule, but I will unpack some of the film …
The first thing we see when we meet Pansy is that she is terrified. She howls and bolts up in bed, waking from a nightmare and we jump with her. She peers out of her antiseptic kitchen to a tiny patch of patio grass, shuddering at the pigeons cooing outside. And without any words spoken, we understand that she’s cowering in a self-made cage.
Pansy is also furious. She is pissed at both her aimless young adult son, Moses, and her hardworking husband, Curly; railing against their slovenly ways. She accuses Moses of having no ambitions. She berates Curly and calls him useless. Her intensity leaves us wondering- how easily could she use these insults against herself?
The extraordinary achievement here is that Marianne’s Pansy is an impenetrable woman, snarling at us, daring us to get closer. And yet, scene by scene, we do get closer and closer, as her face and her body let us in. It is an emotional strip tease performed by an artist who knows how what the camera sees – she knows how much to show – how much to hide.
Meanwhile, Pansy’s sister, Pearl, is her polar opposite; a hairdresser who is popular with her clients, a single mom with two daughters who form a lively tightknit family. Pearl’s emotions are on tap, while Pansy’s are buried deep.
Not much is revealed about the siblings but there are hints that they’ve experienced their childhood so differently, they may as well have grown up in separate households.
There’s not much plot to the film, at least not in the way we’ve come to expect. But the interplay of character’s faces and bodies, lighting and set design, camera placement and movement, feelings, music and cutting all work at optimum levels to tell a riveting story.
In the cinematography of the film, Pansy is imprisoned in her home. Her first look at the outside world is seen as a P.O.V. through window blinds that look like prison bars. The large sliding doors of her kitchen are framed in a wide shot to resemble a fishbowl with her (and us) in it as she peers fearfully outside. Yet in her most emotional outbursts, the camera is unafraid to be right up close. And there it stays for an uncomfortable amount of time. We can’t escape her anger because, well, she can’t escape her anger. Out in the world, we’re sometimes shown a wider view– so we can see (and feel) the ricochet effect of Pansy’s awful and funny torrent of insults fired at a line of supermarket customers. At other times, the frame divides her from others – like when she meets her match in an enraged guy looking for a parking spot.
The production design and the props all work to reveal her world. In contrast to sister Pearl’s colorful, bursting-at-the-seams, plant-filled home, Pansy’s house is a clutter free, controlled environment- in neutral shades of whites, greys and beige, more like a generic Airbnb than a family home. The huge glass doors that dominate the kitchen form the barrier that separates her from the wild ‘out there’. If you look closely, you’ll see that she keeps her kitchen towel neatly double-folded at the sink and the only color in the room comes from a pair of green rubber cleaning gloves. Her son Moses lives mostly in his bedroom (the only room with splashes of color and personal items). Unbuoyed by his family, he fidgets with a model airplane as she scolds him. Maybe he does have dreams.
Whites and beige and grey are featured again in Pansy’s costume design and so her wardrobe serves as camouflage when she’s home. And we wonder, does she get anxious just wearing these clothes since they easily show how dirty life can get?
“Hard Truths” is an independent movie. People often think ‘independent’ is just another way of saying ‘low budget’ and that can certainly be true. But independent can also mean that filmmakers are in charge of the filmmaking. In this case, Mike Leigh (a director who not only “navigates the ship” but collaborates with his team), gave time to the actors, to the DP, to the art department, to costumes and to himself as a writer so that everyone could ponder and plan and richly layer Pansy’s complex world. He is known for setting up situations that nourish creative curiosity. In this, as with his other films, Jean-Baptiste and her fellow actors were free to explore their characters with lengthy conversations, research and improvisations. And he works with the crew in similar ways, encouraging them to explore and research, and then bring back what they found. As screenwriter, it seems that Leigh writes and re-writes to include these discoveries. Then he and his creative team weave it all together as they shoot so that later, Leigh can shape the raw material in post- production with his editor.
Tragically, it is this essential time of preparation that is often seen as frivolous and costly to our media companies. The biggest complaint from filmmakers working in studio productions is that their prep time is constantly being whittled down. And the work suffers for it. So, I am elated to champion a small budget independent film that shows what can be achieved when artists are given the gift of time.
I was glued to my seat at the Walter Reade Theater the day I saw the film. It felt like I was hit by an emotional tsunami. I laughed, cried and laughed/cried my way through it. And I could feel the same emotions hitting the people around me as each went through their own journey.
The most enlightening quote I’ve read about the power of films was by Roger Ebert. He said that our best movies are empathy machines. When I think about Hard Truths and how we get to inhabit the life of this woman in crisis, and how we all, regardless of age, class, race or gender, end up seeing ourselves in her — I am awed by this art form.