Blu-ray Review: Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies on the Criterion Collection

Criterion outfits Leigh’s extraordinarily moving Palme d’Or winner with a transfer that honors its granular intensity.

Secrets & LiesMiddle-aged Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) lives with her twentysomething daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), in a shabby East London apartment that’s filled with the relics of her dead parents. Both women are seriocomically miserable in the Mike Leigh tradition, as Cynthia is a guilt-ridden drinker who desperately tries to over-mother the aloof and scowling Roxanne; for the former, the words “darling” and “sweetheart” are ongoing appeals for love. It takes Leigh little time to establish that these women are trapped in a bitter nightmare, until Cynthia is contacted out of the blue by Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who claims to be the child Cynthia gave up for adoption as a teenager. Hortense is the total opposite of Roxanne, and suggests the daughter that Cynthia might yearn for: impressively employed as an optometrist while Roxanne toils as a road worker, and erudite and easygoing where Roxanne is coarse and hateful.

Most pointedly, Hortense is forgiving of Cynthia, even though she arguably has more legitimate grounds for grievance than Roxanne, as her outsider status imbues her with the gift of seeing her birth mother as a person rather than as a failed parent—a notion that’s intensified when Cynthia passes Hortense off to her family as a friend from work. Hortense has been called a cipher by some critics, a monotonously pleasant woman who’s invested by Leigh with none of the boldly neurotic wrinkles that render many of the filmmaker’s characters, including everyone else in Secrets & Lies, so indelible. There’s also the matter of Hortense being black, and so it’s tempting to read her as a prop, a “magical” person of color sent down from the heavens of contrivance to work miracles for a white family.

These claims aren’t entirely unfair, as the circumstance in which Hortense meets Cynthia and her family is among the most baldly melodramatic plot devices in Leigh’s canon. Yet Hortense’s relationship with this family is also resonant, illustrating the formation of familial bonds during an early stage of seemingly infinite possibilities, before such associations are weighed down with actual experience. These textures would be less freighted with cultural baggage if Hortense were white; by casting a black actor, and by then mostly ignoring the issue of the character’s race in a familial ecosystem that’s otherwise all white, Leigh practically dares you to call him a reductive fantasist. Or perhaps he’s making a humanist point via a form of evasion, treating Hortense as she should idealistically be treated—as simply another person.

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Leigh’s pervading interest here resides in contrasting notions of real versus imagined families and the corresponding senses of hope and despair that they foster. The film is riven with dead and absent mothers and fathers, women who can’t be mothers, men who can’t be fathers, secret sisters, secret children, and children as surrogate friends and parents. Which is to say that Hortense stirs up in Cynthia’s acknowledged family a wealth of submerged regrets and longings. At the opening of the film, Cynthia and her considerably more prosperous brother, a photographer named Maurice (Timothy Spall), barely speak, even though we learn in various conversations that they mutually miss one another. Leigh and his stock company of actors are masters at revealing the years of hurt and yearning stored in characters through small gestures and sharp, wounded lines that pass by on screen in a matter of seconds. The film’s governing melancholia is seemingly summed up when Maurice and his troubled, infertile wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan), talk of Cynthia, Roxanne, and the father Roxanne never knew. Maurice wonders if Roxanne misses her father while Monica says that you can’t miss what you never had. Maurice’s response, perfectly delivered by Spall, hangs in the air: “Can’t you?”

In this nearly Proustian context, Hortense is revealed to be a richer a character than she first appears to be, and she’s consciously, subtly established as existing parallel to Maurice. Firstly, their jobs thematically rhyme: As an optometrist, Hortense instructs people to look at her so she can use her instruments to glean information about their eyes, said to be the windows into people’s souls, while Maurice, as a photographer, directs, cajoles, and counsels his clients so as to capture their happiest essence on film. These jobs underscore the fact that Hortense and Maurice are both successful, intensely empathetic people who’re accustomed—due to the weight and perception of their feelings—to living somewhat outside of their own worlds, attempting to guide the actions of people who misunderstand their success as a sign of invulnerability. The biggest indulgers in this misunderstanding are Cynthia, who defines Maurice and Monica by their wealth and Hortense by her polish, and Monica, who resents Cynthia’s fertility and struggles not to take Maurice’s anguished kindness for granted.

Possibilities of “what could have been” haunt these characters as a kind of emotional phantom limb, then, and Secrets & Lies is enriched by the space that Leigh gives his actors and narrative. The film is composed of free-associational scenes that breathe freely, with revelations and reactions occurring in something resembling real time. This approach is evident in the most famous scene, when Cynthia remembers how Hortense could be her daughter as the pair, framed in a two-shot, sit side by side in a café booth, and, even more astonishingly, when the man who sold Maurice his business, Stuart (Ron Cook), shows up after a failed venture in Australia and castigates Maurice for his success, only to eventually, pitifully, ask for a job. This scene is a minefield of bitterly sad, darkly comic bits, and in a matter of minutes Leigh gives you the measure of a minor character’s life, as he transforms from a caricature to a vivid lost soul before your eyes. Leigh’s films often pivot on such reversals, as they are driven by a tender understanding: It’s easy to see a caricature in any of us from a distance; up close, however, life is messy, unmooring, disappointing, and, yes, sweet.

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Image/Sound

This image boasts a pristine, lovely, and quite healthy sense of detail, from the dark bricks in shabby apartments to the lush whites and pastels of the curtains and furniture of posher residences. (Some scenes are so delicately lit as to suggest watercolor paintings.) The textures and tones of the actors’ faces and clothing are equally vivid—especially Timothy Spall’s sad eyes and burly beard—honoring Mike Leigh’s acute interest in the most minute elements of his characters’ lives. Ably complementing the images is the lush English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 audio track, as it nimbly balances subtle diegetic sounds, including the many variations in actors’ voices, with Andrew Dickson’s cathartic soundtrack.

Extras

A new discussion between Leigh and composer Gary Yershon covers the major themes of Secrets & Lies, though Leigh is refreshingly hesitant to put too fine a point on the film’s emotional reverberations and mysteries. There’s also quite a bit of evocative detail concerning the shooting locations, as well as clarifications about the exact nature of Leigh’s famous and widely misunderstood method of building scripts around advanced improvisations with his actors. We also learn that Leigh’s French producers, unforgivably, wanted him to trim a long scene between Hortense and a friend, one of the few moments that allows her to “just be” in her own climate. (An archive audio interview with Leigh from 1996 goes into much of this material at greater length.) Meanwhile, in a new interview, Marianne Jean-Baptiste talks of being spoiled by Leigh’s curiosity and attention to detail, which is discussed quite beautifully and incisively by critic Ashley Clark in the essay included with the disc’s booklet.

Overall

Criterion outfits Mike Leigh’s extraordinarily moving Palme d’Or winner with a transfer that honors its granular intensity.

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 Cast: Timothy Spall, Phyllis Logan, Brenda Blethyn, Claire Rushbrook, Marianne Jean-baptiste, Elizabeth Berrington, Michele Austin, Lee Ross, Lesley Manville, Ron Cook, Emma Amos, Hannah Davis  Director: Mike Leigh  Screenwriter: Mike Leigh  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 142 min  Rating: R  Year: 1996  Release Date: March 30, 2021  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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