Secrets And Lies

Mike Leigh, UK 1996, 140 minutes

For the last three decades Mike Leigh has been Britain's pre-eminent chronicler of dysfunctional families. He has a brilliant insight into social facades and emotional frailties and is able to produce comedy from the little tragedies of real life. He works closely with his actors and much of the script is developed from improvised material so that acting, writing, and direction form a unified whole. Secrets and Lies brings together seasoned Mike Leigh players to a familiar social setting and is deservedly his most critically acclaimed and popularly successful film to date.

The story revolves around the gloriously pathetic Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), whose chaotic life with her grown-up daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) in a run-down terrace house contrasts with the suburban success of her brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) and his social-climbing wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). With Roxanne's 21st birthday approaching Maurice suggests throwing a party to bring the family together. Just as Cynthia is feeling that things will improve she is knocked completely of balance by a phone call from the daughter she gave up for adoption before Roxanne was born.

Much in the film is intensely funny, but the humour is never cruel. We are allowed to see the fragility and genuine anguish of the characters as well as their ridiculous pretences. Cynthia is deeply embarrassing to her family, as well as to us the audience, but there is real warmth in the unlikely friendship which grows across race and class boundaries with her estranged daughter Hortense (Marianne JeanBaptiste). Lives are blighted by secret resentments and longstanding grievances but there are always flashes of humour and hope. We come to know and care about these characters through a combination of broad comedy and minute gestures and looks which convey their feelings so well. This is the perfect antidote to all those high concept, special effect driven, event movies which have been littering cinemas more and more thickly of late. The drama and comedy in Secrets and Lies grows from an understanding of and love for the intensely real and sympathetic people we see on the screen.

Review by Alison Dalzell
Taken from EUFS Programme 1997-98