Secrets and Lies

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by Stan Schwartz

For many years now, since long before his reigning masterpiece Naked, I have considered British director Mike Leigh the very best contemporary filmmaker working in the English language. Bar none. His buoyant and melancholy new film, Secrets and Lies, which has already won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and has been selected to open this year's New York Film Festival, offers only further testament to his extraordinary powers. Mr. Leigh's work is consistently audacious, original, searing, funny and heartbreaking all at once, and Secrets and Lies is no exception on any of these counts. He is the only filmmaker I can think of who can truly be called Chekhovian (and I would give anything to see him direct Chekhov live on stage) in his uncanny ability to take the smallest moment in the most ordinary character's most banal daily life, and blow it apart to reveal at once both the most profound pain AND the most acute hilarity (though I must concede the scales of Mr. Leigh's Naked tip in favor of the darker side of things). This quality of simultaneous laughter and crying, itself an accurate distillation of the Chekhov universe, could also be considered an equally accurate distillation of the human condition, and Mr. Leigh gets it every time, and with a degree of resonance that leaves the viewer emerging from the darkness vibrating, as if woken from an intense, hyper-real trance.

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Mr. Leigh has called his film "a tale of love and caring and deep longings,and of the awesome relentlessness of the passage of time."

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The amazing thing is that Mr. Leigh achieves all this through seemingly simple, unshowy means that have nothing to do with fancy camera work or large, melodramatic strokes in the story line. That is why the uninitiated may fail to see at first what all the fuss is about. But it is soon evident to anyone just what sets Mr. Leigh's films apart: consistently mind-blowing performances by his actors which unrelentingly capture the raw, emotional truths in the smallest moments of everyday life. As in Bergman's best work, the actors flesh out their characters' emotional life to such an extent that you can't believe you're watching actors act. Rather, you feel you are a voyeur, watching people behave. Unlike Bergman, however, this quality is accomplished through months of improvisation, out of which the script evolves. The camera is only turned on at the very end of the process, after things have more or less been set (an important difference from Cassavettes). Consequently, there is nothing indulgent or amorphous about it: Mr. Leigh has carefully considered, sculpted and structured the entire group process before the cameras have even started rolling, and the resulting work is as taut as it is devastating.

Of course, a plot summary barely touches the essence of any Mike Leigh film. Suffice it to say here that Secrets and Lies tells the story of Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), a lonely, white working class, single, 40-something-ish woman, painfully estranged from her own embittered daughter and her more successful middle-class brother (Timothy Spall) and sister-in-law, and how her life is profoundly shaken up by the sudden arrival of Hortense, an educated and successful, young black optometrist, who announces she is the daughter Cynthia gave away some twenty years ago. The race thing is barely the issue here (unthinkable in the Hollywood version), but rather, it is on a higher, HUMAN level that Secrets and Lies operates, as it so poignantly examines "our compulsive need to reaffirm constantly who and what we are, and where we come from," to quote Mr. Leigh himself.

Although Ms. Blethyn more than deserved her Best Actress award at Cannes (she is extraordinary), all of the actors are every bit as fine, particularly the lovely Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Hortense and Timothy Spall, whose Maurice is positively heartbreaking.

Mr. Leigh has called his film "a tale of love and caring and deep longings, and of the awesome relentlessness of the passage of time." It's an apt and ambitious description, and a difficult one to live up to. But the director has once again so richly succeeded in his goals that you just might find yourself calling him a genius.