“Hard Truths” (Film 4), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is concerned with the modest lives of a working class Black family. I went to see the film in Manchester and, although set in London, the view from the window of the tram back to my hotel afterwards, with the film freshly imprinted onto my consciousness, was of terraced houses and council estates eerily similar to those depicted.
It takes some concentration at first to figure out who’s who in the two halves of the family, linked by middle aged sisters Pansy and Chantelle. The first part of the film splits quite evenly between Chantelle and her two young-adult daughters, but as the film progresses it is Pansy’s family (husband Curtley and son Moses) who come to dominate the attention of the camera, which feels drawn like a teen who can’t stop checking a smartphone to the extraordinary performance of Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Pansy).
The stereotypical view of working class grit and hustle – working three jobs while struggling to pay the bills – is refreshingly absent. Instead Pansy tells us, over and over, that she is tired and just wants to go to bed. She pulls the covers complete over her head – we don’t know if she is asleep but suspects she is not. In fact she is tortured by an intensity of paranoia which Marianne Jean-Baptiste forces us to come face to face with in every scene. At first we wonder if it is funny, if the movie is a comedy: she picks fights with everyone she meets – a sales rep, a cashier, another driver. But after a short while we realise something is very wrong.
Perhaps the tiredness is because she obsessively cleans. We see her cleaning, we see the perfect arrangement of the kitchen, the interest in new sofas, the watching of “my programs” (such as “A Place in the Sun” which is we can neatly overhear in an early scene). However we, the audience, can diagnose what the doctor she visits during the film cannot – severe grief, untreated depression, pathological paranoia.
But even deeper there seemed to me to be a sense in the film that idleness, resting, taking time to do things, is not the sin that many films make out. Working less hard (or not at all) is not so much judged by the film as presented as a fact. But Pansy, the complex character, is both the accuser of her 22-year old son who is unwilling to find work, or even clean his room, and at the same time the one who needs to sleep. The principle applying to her doesn’t apply to her son.
Curtley (David Webber) is the patient husband who tolerates all of this. His isn’t the voice of reason. He doesn’t try to interfere or control. The camera lingers on his stoic, expressive face as we watch him process new information moment by moment. He has learned not to immediately react to Pansy, instead dealing with his life as it actually is. He lives in reality.
Many of us may know of someone who is so paranoid as to be near psychotic. Perhaps someone, like Pansy, who is terrified of insects, foxes, flowers. It would be difficult to overstate how well this paranoia is played in “Hard Truths”. Take a scene at the dentist. She responds to praise about her dental hygiene with a reaction closer to “are you suggesting someone like me has bad teeth?” But then within seconds she tells the dentist that the check up is not good value for money as the dentist is not being thorough enough. She then pivots to complaining about being patronised (something the audience picks up too during the scene). The three thoughts, which I found myself visualising as three angles of an unequally shaped triangle, clearly exist in her mind at exactly the same moment.
Chantelle (Michele Austin) is also suffering. She, too, has lost Pansy to mental illness. She wants to spend time with her sister, coming round after work to fix her hair (Chantelle is a hairdresser at a salon), inviting her to her apartment for a meal, wanting to be joined for an annual visit to their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day. But the negative reaction she gets to each of these modest suggestions is violently over the top. This is demonstrated vividly in an embarrassing scene where she phones Pansy who is waiting in a supermarket queue (we hear Pansy’s half of the conversation). Many of us have perhaps been in a situation of wishing we hadn’t overheard such a phone call. Perhaps we have felt angry that human beings have the capacity speak to each other in this way.
Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) has dealt with his absent mother by withdrawing from life little by little. He is interested in airplanes and stays in his room, the classic gamer with large headphones, playing a game involving flight. He eats too much and is teased in the street for it (“chubs”). He says little and by and large ignores his mum when she starts at him.
Chantelle’s two daughters have relatively small parts in the film. I got the impression their parts were created as the foil to Moses’ idleness – one working in marketing in a fragrance company, the other in a clerical role in a law firm. But even here there is something amiss. Why didn’t the one sister tell the other the truth about what had happened to her that day at work at the fragrance company?
It is familiar territory for me to hear about a son or daughter who seems strangely unmotivated, or overeats, or seems not to aspire to anything. I know that the spectrum of mental illness affects families in Montrose to the extent it does Pansy’s. I know of the patience of people who stay together despite their marriage being anything but a fairytale. The film is refreshing because it is not trying to “fix” any of these things. It doesn’t offer a self-help book approach to “problem solving.” Whilst it is possible during the film to ask the questions, “why doesn’t he leave her?”, “why does she bother with her?”, we know that many of us are in relationships of part absense – goodness knows how many people in this part of Scotland work offshore for long periods, for instance. We know that love, between sisters or in a relationship, is not defined by other people. It follows its own logical integrity and dignity. This brilliant movie deserves to be watched with care and concentration. It is, perhaps I could say, worth it.
6th February
Adam Poole
