Secrets & Lies (1996)
A film review by David Cowen
Copyright 1996 David Cowen
"Secrets and lies!" spouts Maurice (Timothy Spall) at a family gathering with the most terrific sense of combined contempt and concern of any outburst I've ever heard in a film. The title is what the film is about: the ways that people hold things from the people who are close to them, and how those things can burst back to the surface at any moment, disrupting everybody's lives.
If only viewing the first third of SECRETS & LIES, one would be tempted to call the film "Smiles and Frowns" -- the film darts between shots of Maurice doing his business (photography, eliciting strange and artificial expressions from his clients) and the rest of his immediate family who he is not able (except, on a picture hanging on his mantle from 16 years ago) to elicit smiles from: his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan) who works on stencilling their house, his sister Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), a factory worker who appears to be suffering from a nervous breakdown, his niece Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) who is just turning 21 and never speaks with Cynthia, and Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who is just about to become part of the family. The contrast of the artificial smiles and the sulking, brooding nature of everyone in the family is striking and occasionally very funny.
As in other films by director Mike Leigh, it's the performances that hold SECRETS & LIES together. Brenda Blethyn's nervy, love- starved Cynthia strikes just the right note: a scene in which she tries to get a hug from her brother Maurice is touching but truly pitiable, and her first encounters with Hortense are filled with a shaking and trepidation that I've never seen portrayed quite so realistically in film. In a role such as Cynthia's, it's hard to create just the right balance of sympathy and disgust to understand the other characters actions toward her, but Blethyn hits the target dead-on. The other actors, especially Jean-Baptiste, do an admirable job, and a family barbeque scene which under lesser actors could be maudlin, in SECRETS & LIES can tear your heart out.
SECRETS & LIES is a realistically bleak picture, but not as much so as Leigh's last film, NAKED. The characters move through a flux in which their actions and revelations can either be heartwarming or heartbreaking, moving from anguish to contentness in the kinds of surprising but smooth transitions that we see in real life. Mike Leigh's celebrated style of storytelling has always struck me as being amazing in its own right: the concept of starting with a basic idea and then having the characters improvise the parts until the characters become fully developed and a script can be written seems tremendously risky -- but Leigh's work is nearly invariably brilliant, and his films end up painting a much more full portrait of his characters than any other directors' film could.
SECRETS & LIES is one of the rare films that ends on a happy note that doesn't seem contrived, as though the characters had purged themselves of all of the underlying anxieties gnawing at them and causing the conflicts present throughout the rest of the movie. SECRETS & LIES is a film of wonderful realism, and is definately one of the best released this year.
-- signed: ESCHATFISCHE, david h t t p : / /w w w . f i s c h e . c o m (esch@fische.com) ------------------------------------------------------
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