This year, Mike Leigh returned to the present day. His latest film, Hard Truths, which I saw at this year’s London Film Festival, saw the filmmaker depart from recent historical narratives (covering Peterloo and the life of the painter Turner) to a small, bitter and at times genuinely cackle-inducing story of one woman in south London.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a middle-aged black woman with a pristine house, a husband and a son and a younger sister with two daughters of her own living nearby. Pansy is tough to the world and her propensity to snap means she can turn an innocuous encounter with a sales assistant by some soft furnishings, or the checkout queue at the supermarket, into the sort of exchange you’d expect from a stressed criminal about to take on his biggest heist to date. But Pansy isn’t armed with anything. Quite the opposite: when her sister, Chantelle, comes round to do her hair, she is tender-headed and evidently harbours resentments about being the eldest daughter and not having the social lubrication Chantelle and her kids have. Or indeed, that same ease through life that characterises Sally Hawkins as Poppy, the lead character of another one of Leigh’s films (and a personal favourite of mine) Happy-Go-Lucky.
When I saw it before work at a press and industry screening at the festival, the person I was with (Chris, the friend of one of the flatmates twitter brought into my life) said as the credits rolled: “It’s really hard, being alive!” And oh, isn’t it just sometimes? Pansy was a warning sign and a reminder to me of how far things could progress for myself if I’m not careful.
Today is the shortest day of the year in my hemisphere. Before sitting down to write this entry, I looked back at an email I sent in mid-August to a few long-suffering but very patient friends. This has not been a vintage year for me, emotionally. It is possible to be at once surrounded and consider yourself deeply, irreducibly alone. The great irony of the self-absorbed nature of depression is you find yourself banging on and on about how no one cares about you, to the people who care about you, but you don’t really know what else to do! So then you think you are bad craic, and that now for sure no one will care about you because you’re being so ungrateful and terrible conversation. How did I find the email in my mess of an inbox? I searched for the word ‘bitter.’
It is perhaps ill-advised to delve into this stuff on the same day you consider the reduced gift-giving (and more importantly, -receiving) duties I’m on this year that the departmental Secret Santa was a non-incidental consideration. But delve I shall, because just as we have got through the least bright part of the year, so have I with this bout of depression. It’s quite remarkable, actually, how fast the turnaround has been with pharmaceutical intervention. My biggest worry back in the summer was that if I had ‘a lifetime of absence ahead of me,’ (romantically, but not just that), I would turn rancid and subsequently hate myself:
I look around my life at the moment and I am starting to get anxious. The days are fine, and great in fact. I have a good job, enough culture to fill the Nile, and social activities. The weeks, too, are similarly diverting. Even the months. But the years...the years keep going by and I am in an emotional and relational stasis that worries me.
Because I know I will get more and more bitter if I don't do something…the bitterness I'm talking about is going to make me a genuinely unpleasant person in a rapid space of time - unable to rejoice in other people's happinesses; unable to ask for help…
What is interesting is that Pansy has avoided most of the pitfalls we associate with the loneliness epidemic. She is barely online; she is married and lives with her nuclear family, with extended family nearby. She is constantly rubbing up against people, though she makes a big show of hating it: she drives to the supermarket and gets into a hilariously mean exchange with Gary Beadle off EastEnders squabbling over car parking space, instead of ordering an online groceries delivery; she chooses to be in line rather than going for the self-checkout. She is deeply, deeply networked. Some of this is to do with Mike Leigh’s perspective as a filmmaker, no doubt, but also it feels like the great upset of her life isn’t that she doesn’t care about people, but that people don’t find her agreeable. It’s not that she wouldn’t have had a bubble in the lockdown. It’s that she knows she’s hard work.
During the height of my episode of men’s mental health (TM) this year, I felt deeply embarrassed at another year of this project. Of Critmas. Who has asked for it? Was I doing the adult equivalent of thrusting nursery school scribbles into the hands of a parent and getting placated, briefly, by my work going up on the fridge? I guess the difference between me and Pansy, for now is the old adage: I am cringe, but I am free. I decided that even if people were being nice because that’s what polite people do, I would get something out of trying to make something appealing to an audience (and something I’d feel proud of). Because the only way I know how to get out of a funk is to try, and to try to be a good hang, responding to all the stimuli life puts in front of me. Pansy’s life is deeply inwards: the opposite of those people who travel the world to do free cleanings for those brave enough to ask for them, she is house-proud to a potentially compulsive extent. Perhaps this is why the outside world causes her so much distress: there is so much there, and so little to control.
It looks like Hard Truths will get a UK cinematic release in late January/early February, which feels like a good time for a homegrown tragicomedy. While I found the scenes that depicted a broader Black London life (in Chantelle’s hair salon, for instance) less convincing, the central performance is undeniable and I hope people get a chance to see it.
In case you didn’t read it from last year, I think today’s entry is probably the sister piece to the entry on Arrangements in Blue and the mainly positive experience I had on my two weeks interrailing in 2023:
#10: Alonement
This was meant to be my first settled weekend in my new flat. I was set to move in at the start of December, to a one-bed flat above a corner shop in Stoke Newington. I was in a position to pay eight months upfront and replace the existing tenants when they left, but the land…
Re-reading it, I realise that I maybe don’t have my private verbal tic any more? Maybe it went away in the last month or so???? Truly, the wonders of being responsive to medication never cease. I have had that thing for years and years and years.
saw it tonight + the first thing i did was come to read this. which is to say, i, i am asking for critmas. x
Just got to this today - as always your perspective through writing gives me so much to ponder on and I am so grateful for it. xxx