The magnificent range of Marianne Jean-Baptiste

Cynthia bawls, Hortense holds herself together, at first over the phone and then in person. The camera holds mother and daughter in a long shot outside Holborn station, tracking Hortense as she paces past Cynthia without recognition. Then to an uninterrupted take in a café, the women sat side-by-side, eyes moving everywhere except to each other. Cynthia says she cannot be her mother because she never slept with a Black man, before an overwhelming look of recognition comes over her and she starts to weep. We never do find out who that man was – ​“Oh, don’t break my ​‘eart, darlin’” she whines when Hortense later asks if he was a nice man. It is no wonder that Blethyn was awarded for her performance, at the BAFTAs and at Cannes, for it is a more obvious, dramatic performance than that given by Jean-Baptiste. Yet it is her quietness which makes this scene so potent, her extraordinary patience and composure in reassuring the mother who let her go that she should feel no shame for what she did. At the end of the scene, Hortense recalls being told that she was adopted by her mother on a flight back to England from Barbados. ​“I just looked out at the clouds,” she says.

Pansy bolts upright with a shout at the beginning of Hard Truths. She goes to the window and looks through the curtains fearfully at the pigeons outside. She shouts at her son Moses, chastising him for filling the kettle with too much water and for going for walks. At dinner with Moses and her husband Curtley, she launches into a tirade: first against ​“grinning, cheerful charity workers begging you for money for their stupid causes”, then a neighbour who dresses his dog in a coat and boots (“Why has the dog got on a coat? It’s got fur, innit?”), and a local mother who parades around with her daughter in an outfit (“What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s it gonna keep in its pocket? A knife?”). ​“I love babies,” says Hortense wistfully to Cynthia in Secrets & Lies, glancing gently downwards conveying a wish for a life not yet lived. The change of volume in Jean-Baptiste is striking, immediately asserting that this film is no extension to the character she had played before.

There are parallels to be drawn between the two films, largely in the exploration of contrast within a single family. Chantelle clearly adores her daughters, and their flat is filled with laughter and life, compared to the silence and fear in the Deacon household. Hortense clearly lived a cultured, middle-class life away from the loud tensions of the Purleys – ​“Welcome to the family,” jokes Cynthia’s brother Maurice, played by Timothy Spall, to Hortense after his niece’s birthday barbeque goes up in smoke. Both films hinge on such a dramatic dinner scene. In Hard Truths, Pansy agrees to go to Chantelle’s flat for Mother’s Day after she has admitted to her sister that she wants everything to stop and that she is frightened. ​“I don’t understand you, but I love you,” her sister says, making clear that she acknowledges that there is a tumult of complexity brimming away under Pansy’s rage.

Like Hortense at the barbecue, Pansy sits in silence and stares at the floor. Yet here Jean-Baptiste is conveying an anxiety, one which builds into hysterical, maniacal laughter when Moses tells her that he has bought her a bouquet of flowers. It gives way to sobs, louder and more primal than any of the tears shed by Cynthia in Secrets & Lies. The camera moves to everyone around her, in the same stunned silence of Hortense, before returning to Pansy’s soaked face. It is an overwhelming eruption of emotion, one instantly recognisable to anyone who has suppressed a long-term depression, which is at once both frightening and utterly heartbreaking. It feels like an apotheosis, and certainly a catharsis, to Jean-Baptiste’s career. 

Hortense is polite, almost too polite, while Pansy is truly detestable in her manner with everybody. By the end of Secrets & Lies, Jean-Baptiste’s poise is much more relaxed, chatting with her newfound sister Roxanne, played by Claire Rushbrook, with whom she plans to go to the pub. There is not a hint of snobbery on Hortense’s part in her relationship with her new family which makes her extremely endearing. Pansy also starts to change, opening the French doors at the back of her house and breathing in the fresh air. She fills a vase and cuts open the flowers, visibly anxious of doing so and yet she manages it. They are small steps towards liberation from the guards she has built up around her. This cinematic diptych shall surely be Jean-Baptiste’s acting legacy, and while it would be wonderful to have seen her more on this side of the pond, few actors ever reach the command of nuance, subtlety, and inner complexity she displays.