Rent Hard Truths (2024)

Return to sombre social realism from Mike Leigh - Hard Truths review by PD

Mike Leigh’s latest invites us to spend an hour and a half with the most insufferable woman in the world, and that all the ensuing unpleasantness turns out to be time well spent is a credit to Leigh’s curiosity about those intent to spread misery and the joy-sucking traps they set for themselves and others. In a welcome return to his classic sombre social realist trademark, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a London housewife, goes to sleep frowning and wakes up screaming — her anger at life, the universe and anything seemingly solar-powered; in a rare lowkey moment, when her mellower sister Chantelle asks why she can’t enjoy life, Pansy instinctively blurts, “I don’t know!”

Jean-Baptiste delivers a truly astonishing performance that burns through the screen like a flamethrower. One of her first rants kicks off with a corker of a line — “Cheerful, grinning people, can’t stand ’em!” — and goes on to scorch everything on the block, from dogs in sweaters to baby clothes with pockets. Her tongue-lashing is often hilarious (at least to us), although it leaves Pansy’s husband, Curtley and their 22-year-old browbeaten, layabout son, Moses, reduced to silence, petrified they’ll draw her ire. Pansy is such an unpleasant force that you begin to wonder if she’ll be visited by three spirits in the night - clearly, she and not the world around her is the problem, but our own narrative need to understand her and offer solutions makes us comb through her tirades looking for clues, determined to decide where she should fall on a scale from flat-out mean to mentally ill.

As we start to collect a list of Pansy’s triggers (lifts, germs, animals, bouquets of flowers), her world does feel like a prison, an idea that the cinematographer underlines with a shot of her fearfully huffing up a set of stairs, her exhausted face peeking through the bars on the handrails as though she’s locked inside a cell, although a rather too obvious dirgy score is for me too heavy-handed at reinforcing her sterile life - far better surely just to let the action speak for itself. One of Leigh's favourite motifs is the sound of cooing pigeons — pests to some, but also survivors who’ve adapted to survive on crumbs of kindness, a theme picked up on sporadically as morsels of patience and generosity become life-giving sustenance, even if we perhaps cathartically prefer the scenes where strangers fire back at Pansy with both barrels.

Every scene is a comment on the art of complaining, although it's not an anti-complaining film as such - expressing our grievances properly can be a way of bonding, which Chantelle, a hairdresser, knows from the customers who come to share their grievances, whilst Chantelle's two relentlessly upbeat adult children, whose deliveries will unnerve anyone who has played the role of the family mediator, are at one point revealed to be both putting up a false front, their soft and smiling phoniness in sharp contrast to the film’s title: we might prefer their positivity, but we can’t pretend it’s healthy. Pansy's chronic issue by contrast is that she complains gratuitously, stacking her gripes into a wall so that even the people who want to help simply give up.

As often in Mike Leigh, he steers uncomfortably close at times to inviting us to laugh at the characters on offer rather than empathise with them, and there's also the inevitable semi-epiphanal moment involving lots of tears, but here the film is better for having a closing scene doesn't allow us anything by way of closure.