Marianne Jean-Baptiste says that she’s playing “the ultimate Karen” in Mike Leigh’s new film Hard Truths. The character’s name is, actually, Pansy. The horticulturalists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, just outside of London, describe the Pansy flower as a symbol for “humanism.”
That’s not a description Jean-Baptiste would recognize in the Pansy she plays in the movie.
She smiles as she relates how the character she and Leigh created after intense discussion and rehearsal “as a combination of five different women, all of whom had the milk of human kindness removed from them.”
That’s a perfect summation of Pansy, a fastidious woman, who keeps the North London house she shares with her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) as their unmotivated son, spotlessly clean.
She’s particularly fixated on polishing her leather couch.
Her family, including her sister Chantel, played by Michele Austin, and her daughters — Pansy’s nieces, Kayla and Alisha, played by Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown, walk on eggshells when they’re around her. Doctors, dentists, sofa-store salespeople — anyone she encounters really — feel the lash of her tongue.
It’s possible to relate Pansy’s problems to her childhood where Pansy always felt that her mother favored Chantel. Bitter Pansy’s hilarious, and reminds me of one of those grand, galleon-type women in Restoration comedies, for whom nothing is good enough. Let’s call her the Hon. Lady Too Bloody Hard To Please-Take Your Shoe’s Off Before You Come Into This Clean House-Smythe-Bottom.
She’s Patricia Rutledge as Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet) in Keeping Up Appearances but with a broom-handle inappropriately positioned about her.
Pansy is recognizable to me. I have seen her in my imperious royal Nigerian aunties, and in quite a few of the wannabe posh white women I used to deliver groceries to — riding one of those heavy tradesman’s bikes — in the more favorable parts of Richmond upon Thames.
Pansy has no sense of humor, but we — OK, I mean me — find her beyond amusing.
The fact that Pansy is Black has little to do with it. That woman has been everywhere in my life.
Jean-Baptiste says that what’s so refreshing about her character, and the film, “is that it’s just people living and experiencing stuff and the family dynamics and misunderstanding and sort of being stuck in a situation that you feel you’ve got no power to get out of it.”
Here’s the thing, she adds, “the beauty of it, sadly, is where we are often just seen as in these issue-based dramas or these political dramas where there’s suffering or this trauma porn and it’s dehumanizing. It’s like we don’t have any sort of other experiences that aren’t related to race.”
I spoke to Leigh separately and he says that “at one level, that was absolutely deliberate and intentional to make a film which deals with all the things that life is about,” but with a storyline where it doesn’t “feel that one has to kind of wheel out these tropes and cliches because these are people. It’s about society.”
Of those other films, Leigh says, “They call them urban dramas.” In fact, Leigh admits that there’s “just a whiff of that world” when two guys confront Moses, Pansy’s son.
“So many other dramas are full of that street behavior, but here it just sits where it sits, and that’s all you get of it, really.”
He and Jean-Baptiste famously worked together on Secrets & Lies which was released 28 years ago, garnering Jean-Baptiste a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination; Brenda Blethyn, who played her mother, was cited in the Best Actress category. Leigh was nominated for Best Director and the movie was propelled to the Best Film list.
Prior to Secrets & Lies, Leigh directed Jean-Baptiste and Austin in his play It’s A Great Big Shame at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where they portrayed siblings.
Austin had a role in Secrets & Lies too. There’s a scene in the film where Jean-Baptiste’s character Hortense Cumberbatch (this was well before Benedict Cumberbatch arrived on the acting scene) and her friend Dionne share a drink, thoughts and feelings, and that was Austin.
Leigh says: “So this is the third time they’ve done a thing together. And that, in a way, is central, I thought, and then around that, you gather a group of others and explore. And also what I’m very pleased [about] with the film is that the subsidiary actors who play minor brief roles are all impeccable.”
SECRETS & LIES, Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, 1996
Jean-Baptiste and Leigh wanted to work together again for years, but at least one of their previous attempts was aborted because of the pandemic.
Also, Jean-Baptiste jokes, Leigh went “off on a period journey.” (She was referring to Leigh’s “period” costume dramas: Topsy-Turvy, Mr.Turner and Peterloo.)
It’s clear that Leigh admires Jean-Baptiste enormously.
“First of all, she’s an extremely bright woman. She’s got a great sense of humor. She has enormous generosity. There’s no bullshit with her at all,” he declares. “But when she really, really goes for it, she goes into character and she really pulls out the stops, and she does it with incredible accuracy. And when she comes out of character, she’s not Pansy at all. She was very supportive to the younger actors and all of that. She’s a joy. And she’s a very, very funny woman,” he says.
“I’ve obviously had Black characters in my films,“ says Leigh, “but I thought, OK, given that the premise was to get Marianne over from the States to really play a central role, let’s get a gang of Black actors together and explore and make something happen. And out of that comes the film. Beyond that, anything that I share with you is indeed what’s in the film. I can’t say any more than that. I mean, I think it’s hard for people to realize quite how, in conventional terms, how nebulous in narratives of my ideas are. They’re not. I discover the films by the processes, as I say, of making them,” Leigh explains.
Ahead of production there was no film outline, no sense of what the plot would be and no character was defined in any shape or form. The nature of a Mike Leigh film is that the characters are developed individually between filmmaker and thespian.
Leigh explains: “I invite them to take part. They know that we don’t know what it is. We know that there’s no character. We will explore, we’ll create a character, we’ll put them together. We’ll bring a world into existence. I mean, it’s a blind journey.”
And he rejects any suggestion of prior conversations before they sit together in a room and conjure up their artistry.
“The actors take it on trust,” he insists, “and I take it on trust. Obviously, I have thoroughly auditioned the new actors I’ve worked with. And, of course, you have in the duo of Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michelle Austin, two actresses who have worked together and as you know, this is the third time they’ve done a duo with me, actually.”
In discussing the same idea of how characters are created for a Mike Leigh film, Jean-Baptiste notes that “we’re creating this character from their first memory to the age that they’re going to play. So lots of disappointment, and pain, and you kind of get this mixture, this combination of all those things. You get a person whose issues are not addressed. Culturally at that time, if this person exhibiting these types of behaviors — not wanting to go out or not being comfortable going out there — a Jamaican mother probably would’ve gone, ‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t be silly. Just go.’ As opposed to going to the doctor and going, ‘Do you know what? This is ridiculous what’s going on.’ So it was all that work or that background stuff.”
There’s a conversation that the sisters have in a cemetery where they go to tend their mother’s grave. Pansy’s long-buried resentments, simmer and rise to the surface.
We, all of us, have known of or experienced, such situations regarding siblings, even those who have remained close.
Jean-Baptiste agrees. “What’s interesting is everybody has their own script, so their perception of what’s happening is very different from the other person’s perception. We very often remember criticism or harsh words, rather than positive feedback and encouragement. For some reason it sticks with us and stays with us. So it’s really an example of that as well. Her not registering praise and appreciation and just focusing on when her mother upbraided her.”
Pansy’s a deliciously-shaped character who breathes disappointment and bitterness.
“It’s interesting,” says Jean-Baptiste, “at the time, obviously, I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is too much, someone’s going to hit her.’ Just working with Mike and trusting him, if it’s too much he’ll pull it back. It’s been interesting the amount of people who have said they know Pansy or they’ve been Pansied. Grandparents, mother-in-laws, you know.”
Marianne Jean-Baprtiste and Mike Leigh. Thin Man Films Ltd.
But, we both agree, people still have compassion for Pansy and that they want her to get better. Under her heavy psychological armor, there is a Pansy who could, under the right circumstances, bloom.
And, listen, Pansy’s hapless husband Curtley is no help at all.
He only thinks of himself. When he arrives home from work and there’s no dinner waiting for him on the table, it’s like the end of his world. Curtley’s unable, or unwilling, to whip together a salad, or whatever, himself. He’s encouraged Pansy to wait on him hand and foot. I see now that part of what’s happening, perhaps, is that Pansy’s reneging, at last, from that contract.
As an aside, I ask Leigh if he can cook. He responds, that “if you ask around people will tell you that I’m a very good cook.”
And because my son has been friendly with one of his two sons since their school-days — a friendship totally independent of ours — I have direct knowledge of this being an accurate statement. (And, by the way, my son is no gossip. I hear of people he knows, almost accidentally, years after the fact.)
In a long, rambling, around-about-way, I ask Leigh about being a white man directing a mostly Black cast.
“I mean, you are very familiar with a lot of my work,” he beings to respond. “I’ve been into all sorts of different areas of society, and I’m able to do that because apart from researching and being around and having my ears and eyes open and all of rest of it, it’s a lot to do with the way I can collaborate with actors who contribute their own experience. And working with Marianne, which is a great delight because she’s such a creative and talented woman, we’re able to explore.”
“Of course, having said that, I know there are characters like that in my life as well. Actually, I’m even related to some women in my life like that. Not all of whom are still alive, but at least one is indeed.”
He adds though that he doesn’t really like to analyze “what is there for you, the audience to discern.”
I push back and he concedes that “to some degree she [Pansy] suffers from what’s become her way of life. She’s locked into it, she’s kind of anal in many ways.”
Dick Pope, the cinematographer on Hard Truths, is a longtime collaborator of Leigh’s. He shot Jean-Baptiste in Secrets & Lies and I asked Jean-Baptiste what they talked about during filming.
She began by me telling us that her eldest daughter is a DoP.
“So we talked a lot about that and about her and the life, if you like. We talked a bit about the process. We talked about the fact that it’s such a sort of actor friendly environment, and there’s a lot of patience on the part of the crew. But then there’s also a lot of excitement when they come in and we show them a quick rehearsed run-through of what’s happening because they’re discovering the story as we are. It’s all happening at the same time. And then they go off for a bit while we continue rehearsing and come back and shoot it.”
Marianne Jean-Baptiste.
Amazon
The story is, she says, “kind of slowly revealed. I mean, Dick probably knows a lot more. They do camera tests and stuff like that in the locations, and we move into the locations, and that’s when we really start the detailed improvisations of what is actually going to take place in those spaces. But I remember at one point, there’s a scene where Pansy…she’s trying to get away from Curtley, and she goes and sits in front of the big kitchen windows before she goes outside to the garden. And afterwards, the makeup artist said to me, ‘God, I wondered when that was going to happen,’ because we did the camera test. And I was like, ‘That must’ve been some hypnosis because nothing we had done before would indicate that she would ever go and sit there by the window.’”
Jean-Baptiste ponders for a moment and says: “So it’s like, OK, well maybe Mike is a master manipulator or something like that, because it was quite organic, the argument upstairs and then her coming down and then just looking outside. We’d only just done it but the crew knew it was coming.”
It’s a mystery. I interviewed Leigh before Jean-Baptiste and I spoke, so there wasn’t an opportunity for me to put the point to him.
I suggest that perhaps it’s because Leigh tends to work with so many of the same people on his crew, that they’re intuitively attuned to the process of how he works. They can simply intuit what’s going to happen.
“Maybe they can just, yeah,” she agrees, although with some reluctance.
After a moment’s reflection, she adds this: “You’re literally, you’re sitting there creating the character with him. All the major events that take place in that person’s life that they have no control over, he decides.”
They moved into the house that would be the family home two weeks ahead of the actual shoot.
“You start owning it, you get all the production design people in, you talk to them about what’s in the cupboards, what sort of teas, coffees, foods [are] in the fridge, et cetera, et cetera. You pick your sheets and pillowcases,” Jean-Baptiste explains.
Jean-Baptiste says that she rolled her sleeves up and did some cooking, washing up and “quite a bit of cleaning.”
She laughs, and adds, “She’s a serious cleaner, that one. I don’t mind a bit of cleaning myself as it happens.”
I’m suddenly intrigued — in truth, desperate — to know whether or not she slept there.
“Actually I did during the filming and rehearsals and stuff, yes. I had a nice little snooze, quite easy to fall asleep. I was exhausted — me, Marianne, — but she, Pansy, had great difficulty sleeping. And anytime she would fall asleep, she’d be woken up. So a couple of times I’d actually nodded off and was woken in reality.”
Working with Austin again after nearly three decades “was like a big reunion and I just loved the woman. We just supported each other through the process, cried together, laughed a lot together. I think what was difficult at times for me, Marianne, as opposed to Pansy, was the fact that I love her so much. And sometimes you want to be able to show that through the work within the characters. And I know that the scenes that she had with her daughters were very loving and warm and stuff. And so I felt a little bit hurt by the fact that every time my character interacted with anyone, it was sort of bittersweet.”
Were larks had though, I ask her?
“Oh yes,” she giggles. “When Mike said ‘cut’ very often, I’d be laughing a lot. I mean, one of the crew members, he goes, ‘You’re so happy and smiley, but whenever I see you on set, you are a miserable cow.’ I was like, ‘That is the character.’”
There are probably about 10 films by Mike Leigh on my all-time top 100 list of movies. I’ve been watching his films all my life from his time making short films for schools in the 1960s, to his powerful dramas for the BBC to when he began directing features such as High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies, Career Girls (for which, by the way, Jean-Baptiste wrote some of the score for), All of Nothing, Vera Drake, Happy-Go Lucky, Another Year, Mr.Turner, and Peterloo. And let’s not forget the masterful comic timing in his 1970 dark comedy Abigail’s Party that was an edition of the BBC’s Pay or Today and a stage play. Watching it again, recently, over half a century later, it remains a play for today with Alison Steadman’s stand-out performance.
I feel it’s appropriate, therefore, to ask him how he views the state of cinema now.
“Well, where are we?” he laughs. “It’s a hard one, isn’t it?”
He had in front of him a list of the films from around the world chosen to feature in this year’s New York Film Festival, of which Hard Truths is one.
He pronounces the selection “an amazing crop.”
“The diversity,” he exclaims.
“This is all non-Hollywood cinema — incredibly rich, diverse. So in that sense, it’s going on there. If we’re talking about, which I suspect we probably are, cinema here, or Hollywood cinema, that’s a different thing. But we battle. Look, I have real trouble getting backing to a film because, as you know, I come along and I say, ‘I don’t have a script. Can’t tell you about casting. Can’t tell you what it’s about. Give us the money now.’ That’s what I’ve always done. The only times there was slightly more information was when I said it’s going to be a film about Gilbert and Sullivan,” he says, referring to Topsy-Turvy.
“It’s a film about JMW Turner, the painter. It’s about the Peterloo massacre. And those enable us to get bigger budgets than we otherwise have got. But for all the other films, it’s been, can’t tell anything about it. Give us the dosh. And it’s got harder. It was much easier earlier. And it was a battle to get together, a quite meager budget for Hard Truths. And we’re still trying to do something else, another film. And it’s tough. There are supporters, but it’s very, very difficult. And the big boys, that’s to say the streamers, and they basically don’t want to know, really.”
He notes that Amazon “were great on Peterloo. They came in right from the beginning and they said, ‘Great.’ And they were fantastic. And they put in a large proportion of the budget. They never interfered with it. And they were very supportive, but they were new. They were new on the block. And by the time we went back to them for the next film, they didn’t want to know; because they’d become Netflix. And they don’t want to know. And, partly as much as anything, it’s because, and you know this, you make a film for them, they are all over it. They interfere with the casting. They want do something with the editing. They want to change the ending and all that stuff. All the old-fashioned stuff. And when they know that there’s the filmmaker that doesn’t do that, and you just say, ‘Go away. Make the film as you want.’ And then that’s it. They don’t want to know. It’s too dangerous.”
A Mike Leigh film is not an algorithm, I say.
“Absolutely. I mean, quite, could you imagine trying to, well, I didn’t even complete what I was going to say,” he says, then as an afterthought he finds what he was searching for. “You are not a number, there,” he says.
“There are great films, and there’s this product,” he says contemptuously.
Does he ever go and see films from the industrial complex sphere, I ask him?
He says that he often goes to summer blockbusters and the like. Leigh lives close to the British Museum in central London, and I have often seen him pottering around and about some of the more arty cinemas in the West End and at the bigger film houses as well.
“Don’t ask me about specific pictures,” he demands, but allows that yes, “I do, I go to the pictures.”
Then he gently changes the subject and asks if I’ve seen a film called Sweet Sue.
Since that conversation, I have in fact seen Sweet Sue.
It’s an oddball comedy directed by one Leo Leigh.
“It’s a really nice film,” Leigh says. “He’s his own man, it’s really interesting stuff,” he says simply.
His voice drops as he speaks about his son’s film and in that moment, although we are separated by a screen, I feel this warmth, this love, all at once. It’s very strange. Then I realize, that every frame of every Mike Leigh film is flooding my brain.
And my voice drops too.
