Mike Leigh (1996)
Like Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies seemed at the time of its original release a new departure for Mike Leigh, though in a very different way. This story of a young London woman, adopted as a baby, who makes contact with her biological mother, has a conventional dramatic structure and is emotionally involving as no other Leigh film before it had been, and only Vera Drake (2004), perhaps his finest work, has been since. Secrets & Lies remains unique in the Leigh screen oeuvre in that race is a central theme. The birth mother is white. The daughter she gave up for adoption is not.
Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), in her late twenties, is attractive, quietly self-possessed and professionally successful – she works as an optometrist. (Unlikely she’d have had the same surname if Leigh had made Secrets & Lies a few years later!) The film begins with the funeral of the (Black) woman who raised Hortense, and with whom she enjoyed a very good relationship. Her adoptive mother’s death is the trigger for investigating her biological parentage. There’s no information about her father but Hortense finds out the identity and astonishing ethnicity of her mother. Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn), in her late forties, has a job in a cardboard box factory. She lives in a poky terraced house in East London with Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), her daughter from a subsequent relationship, who sweeps streets for the council. Cynthia’s younger brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), runs a successful photography business. He and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan) have a swish home in the London suburbs but no children of their own. Roxanne, whose father was never around when she was growing up, is like a daughter to Maurice. He and Monica are soon to host a twenty-first-birthday party for her.
This party is the climax of Secrets & Lies and, by the time it comes round, Hortense has given unhappy, maudlin Cynthia a new lease of life. Their reunion does more than get Cynthia out of the house where she and Roxanne bicker non-stop. When Hortense first makes phone contact, Cynthia hangs up and, although she subsequently agrees to see Hortense, she’s scared stiff of doing so. At their first meeting, Cynthia refuses to believe this can be her daughter until confronted with the evidence of Hortense’s birth certificate. But both want to meet again, and soon get to enjoy one another’s company. It’s a novel experience for Cynthia to feel wanted, to have someone say nice things to and about her. Roxanne, even though she has a boyfriend, Paul (Lee Ross), and Cynthia gets on her nerves, is miffed and mystified when her mother starts not only going out to meet ‘a friend’ but also making an effort to look nice. Hortense has soon become so important to her that Cynthia invites her to Roxanne’s party – in the guise of a work colleague. Hortense, though apprehensive about the subterfuge, is anxious not to disappoint her mother.
When he made Secrets & Lies, Mike Leigh hadn’t worked in theatre for some years (he would return to it in 2005) but the twenty-first party, as major secrets are disclosed there, feels stagebound. When Hortense’s true identity is revealed, Roxanne storms out but Paul and Maurice persuade her to return, so that the final-act litany of home truths can resume. Monica admits she’s incapable of having children. The exasperated Maurice – a perennially unsuccessful peacemaker between his wife, his sister and his niece – delivers the key speech:
‘Secrets and lies! We’re all in pain – why can’t we share our pain? I’ve spent my entire life trying to make people happy, and the three people I love the most in the world hate each other’s guts, and I’m in the middle – I can’t take it anymore!’
The film’s climax would probably work better on stage for two reasons. First, the actors’ intensity, in a space that the viewer physically shares, might be inescapable. Second, a theatre audience often implicitly accepts what’s said in a play on the grounds that the scene before their eyes is the only place where it can be said (a-stage-is-all-the-world syndrome). On the screen, the party sequences are hamstrung by implausibility – a problem magnified by Mike Leigh’s commitment to ‘truth’. When she opens the front door to Hortense, it’s a good touch that Monica briefly mistakes her for a Jehovah’s Witness; it’s unconvincing, even before the major revelations start coming, that desperately house-proud Monica gives Cynthia (whom she thoroughly despises) and Hortense (despised by association with Cynthia) a pearls-before-swine tour of the place. Her sister-in-law’s snooty prosperity is a thorn in the side of Cynthia, who would probably have long suspected why Monica is childless – and voiced her suspicions, at least to Roxanne. Cynthia isn’t malicious but you feel she’d derive some consoling satisfaction from Monica’s failure in the child-bearing department. Her incredulous response to Monica’s confession at the party triggers a similar reaction on the part of the viewer.
There’s another improbability in Secrets & Lies that is fundamental, salient and persisting. On release, it was widely admired and won numerous awards but the colour of Hortense’s skin bothered many. It’s more than understandable that, when they first meet, Cynthia is sure Hortense must have been misinformed: how could Cynthia have given birth to a daughter whose appearance isn’t mixed race but Black? (The related question – how come Cynthia never noticed her baby was Black? – is dealt with, though a bit shakily: Cynthia tells Hortense she was in such a state that she begged the nurses on the maternity ward not to let her see the baby that, as an unmarried teenager, she knew she couldn’t keep.) Marianne Jean-Baptiste was born in London to an Antiguan mother and a St Lucian father. In theory, her presence in Secrets & Lies might be retrospectively justified as ahead-of-its-time colour-blind casting. But it’s impossible to ignore Hortense’s appearance when Cynthia’s disbelief that this is her child matters dramatically.
We also want to know, more than we ever do, how Hortense feels about having a white mother. In the early stages, Hortense is the protagonist and, although she lives alone, she’s hardly isolated. She has two brothers (Brian Bovell and Trevor Laird), the biological sons of her adoptive mother. There’s a good scene, before Hortense has met Cynthia, in which she and her friend Dionne (Michele Austin) drink and talk easily and intimately. We believe this is someone Hortense can confide in so it’s frustrating that Dionne never reappears. The focus gradually switches to Cynthia and Maurice as the main characters. Mike Leigh was angered by claims that Secrets & Lies ignored the possibility (to put it mildly) that Cynthia or members of her family might find it hard to accept Hortense for racist reasons. As Ashley Clark points out (in an extract from a March 2021 piece he wrote on criterion.com which BFI used as the handout for this screening), a more serious omission is that the film, though Clark is mostly admiring of it, doesn’t ‘explore how Hortense processes the monumental upending of her own identity, how she reacts to the newly complicated nature of her own Blackness in relation to her existing family and community’. This certainly is a problematic oversight in a drama so fraught with racial meaning – and, for its time, so distinctive in that respect.
Hortense and Cynthia are ill matched in another way. The scene between them in an otherwise deserted café near Holborn tube station – where Cynthia is compelled to accept the truth of who Hortense is – is the film’s most celebrated. It’s also the sequence in which the very different acting styles of the two players concerned are hardest to ignore. Mike Leigh’s famed approach of developing each character individually in collaboration with the actor, allowing cast members and their creations to meet only when he decides it’s time, yields satisfying results if the actors are eventually in sync. In Career Girls (1997), the relatively unsung film that followed immediately after this one, the acting of both Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman as the pair of title characters is vocally and facially exaggerated but their double act works. The performances articulate. Cartlidge and Steadman, through being thoroughly in tune, are also increasingly believable. They go beyond artifice to find real feeling.
There’s an inherent risk in Leigh’s approach, however, that it will result in pieces of accomplished acting that seem to exist in isolation from each other. The risk may be greater if the actor concerned has a relatively small part and less opportunity to interact with others: in Secrets & Lies, Ron Cook’s few minutes on screen as the embittered former owner of the premises where Maurice’s photography business is now flourishing, are the starkest instance of a performance taking place in a vacuum. The Holborn café scene is a tour de force: an eight-minute, single-take shot in which Cynthia and Hortense sit side by side, facing the camera. Yet that set-up and duration serve to confirm that Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s low-key naturalism and Brenda Blethyn’s busy theatricality, though both are strongly felt, belong in different films.
It’s hard to believe Mike Leigh doesn’t himself notice this and therefore hard to understand why he allows it to happen – unless he believes his creative method is sacrosanct regardless of the consequences. Brenda Blethyn’s commitment and consistency are such that you admire her effort but she’s exhausting to watch – you keep wishing she’d just stop acting for a bit. There are moments in the climactic party episode when she maybe does – when she seems to have exhausted herself and lets the camera look into Cynthia, instead of imposing herself on the camera – to touching effect. Compared with Blethyn, Timothy Spall is impressively nuanced and he, too, is moving when Maurice finally erupts. The ‘secrets and lies’ speech is overwritten (it could lose that ‘I can’t take it anymore!’ for a start) but nonetheless affecting – it feels like a reward for the actor’s, as much as his character’s, valiant self-control.
The main supporting roles are too narrowly conceived for those playing them to do much with. Roxanne is monotonously bolshy. Materialistic Monica, except for her heartbreaking secret (which, for the audience, is an open secret), is a stock Leigh character. Elizabeth Berrington is effective in the smaller part of Maurice’s secretary; ditto Lesley Manville, in a cameo as a social worker Hortense meets with. There’s a self-referential, amusingly incongruous montage of other actors familiar from earlier Leigh films, as people having their photographs taken at Maurice’s studio – among them, Alison Steadman (as a dog owner), Liz Smith (as a cat owner), Phil Davis, Ruth Sheen and Peter Wight. Maurice’s session with a facially scarred young woman (Emma Amos), who wants visual evidence to support her compensation claim, registers more strongly.
The series of outbursts at Roxanne’s party has a cathartic effect which, even if it’s not too easy to believe, comes as a relief. Some (unspecified) time after the party, Hortense visits the home of her mother and half-sister. When Hortense says she’s always wanted a sister, Roxanne, for once, is amenable. Cynthia brings a tea tray out into the tiny back garden. The atmosphere is not just conciliatory but almost convalescent. Even Andrew Dickson’s threnodic cello music finally calms down.
27 November 2021
