Light pours into nearly every frame of Hard Truths, but sunshine isn’t something to bask in for Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). Rather, it’s something to run from as it chases her through her living room, her backyard, and the cemetery. The very fact of daylight, of the life it brings, seems to frighten her. Birds and foxes in her backyard make her scream, even from the shield of her thick glass sliding door. The name Pansy feels both ironic and spot-on; Pansy isn’t soft but she’s impossibly sensitive, practically searching for something to wound her.
Pansy is enraged by everyone and everything. Her son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) is out too much and home too often, her husband, Curtley (David Webber), doesn’t say enough and when he does speak, seems to say everything wrong. Charity workers, grocery clerks, the woman helping her in a furniture store, her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), all ask too much of Pansy without ever caring about her enough.
Jean-Baptiste’s performance is a little miracle; tapping into a grating, nearing-on-crazed rage that can also somehow come across as nearly poetic in its flow. Pansy’s minutes-long tirade over dinner in the first few minutes of the film is a nightmarish screed, but where her husband and son have become expert at tuning her out, we are still learning her rhythm. We cannot look away from her completely unwarranted, but so felt, sense of injustice over nothing. When Pansy occasionally cracks open the slightest bit, betraying the immense pain and fear brewing beneath her superficial tirades, it’s done with a stunning skill on the account of Jean-Baptiste.
Hard Truths tells its story through a gradual unspooling of what makes Pansy function as she does. Her sister Chantelle is, in many ways, her spiritual opposite. Chantelle’s two daughters delight her, and delight in sharing with her. Her work as a hairdresser allows for her to connect and gossip within her community. She isn’t giddy, but optimistically pragmatic. She moves through love, remaining open where Pansy is closed up tight.
Hard Truths has a quiet hum of wide-scale discontent in the background; taking place in the midst of an ongoing but everchanging pandemic, all the more painful for Pansy and Chantelle due to an individual grief in the midst.
Pansy cannot avoid real pain even with all of her thorny guards up. The way through life isn’t one of constant skepticism, nor is it of heads in sand. But the magic of Hard Truths is the way Pansy’s self-imposed suffering reveals all the joy, connection, and potential gratitude just at her fingertips if she would only choose to see it. We can see the sunshine, the kind sister. And we, too, can see where her life is genuinely flawed; she’s mourning loved ones, and stonewalled by some who have given up on her. Pansy is an example of a way for us to not live as well as a well of empathy for those like her who are stuck, all in one.
Hard Truths can feel impossibly bleak. And yet somehow, it feels as if it’s showing us a way through. We don’t have to love every moment, but we can’t deny that the sunshine is, in fact, often right there.
