Fran Magazine: Issue #66

Back to the treasure trove of Mike Leigh

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I always forget that they say “secrets and lies” aloud in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies. It’s not even “they,” it’s Timothy Spall—billed first, I believe, but easily the third main character, if you consider the film’s narrative on the whole, playing what my friend Jake calls “a character of such honest, everyday goodness,” pushed to the brink of hysteria after a family argument goes sideways. Secrets & Lies is concerned with family distrust and suspicion, with literal secrets and literal lies, a mess of what is unsaid said aloud for the first time.

I spent the summer of 2020 watching as much of the Mike Leigh catalog as I could get my hands on — the days long and strange and miserable. I was working, hardly, and volunteering, sometimes, and otherwise running and sleeping and cooking. I recall Sydney and I made a banana cream pie at one point, because it felt like the right thing to do. When I dipped out for a slice at 10pm and turned on our kitchen light, a mouse scurried across the floor. That was the vibe that summer. But I had my Leigh films, which I watched on my overheating laptop in bed, sometimes over the course of a few days to draw out the process.

Secrets & Lies won Mike Leigh the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year — ‘96 — but in the way that Best Picture is often not the best picture, it’s easy to look at a Palme winner and make assumptions. Secrets & Lies is by no means the best Leigh, probably, and wears its flaws in an obvious sort of way, but Leigh’s kitchen sink, working class empathies and curiosities are so lovingly displayed that it’s hard to deny it any praise. Every time I return to this film in particular, I think I will have soured on it. The other week Bobby and Patrick and I saw it at Metrograph, my first time seeing it on a big screen, and it was even more intense and emotional than it’s felt in the past.

Secrets & Lies is the story of a family, mostly a mother, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), and daughter, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), separated by adoption and reconnecting later in life; of course, there is also the matter of Cynthia’s other daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook — a really underrated performance and also an unintentionally (?) stylish character, I mean, her little watch! her heart ring!) who is young and ornery, as well Cynthia’s brother Maurice (aforementioned Timothy Spall) and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan) who are struggling to conceive. The film is less plot and more endless negotiations and avoidances, each character coming to terms with the realization that their happiness and miseries are tied to each other. They all need each other to survive. Isn’t that something.

This is a film full of stand-out scenes, many of them static, long shots that allow for a complete spectrum of emotional realization, but the one that I’d draw attention to — where I would doctor together a pithy, half-viral tweet of an audience screaming when it begins — is Lesley Manville’s brief appearance as an unnamed social worker that Hortense meets with in order to search for her mother. You can watched a somewhat weird-looking but complete version of the scene here.