"Secrets and Lies" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL November 30, 1996 It's not often that a film that won both Best Film and Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival hits Tampa, but this week is such a week. The film is the British family melodrama "Secrets and Lies" by filmmaker Mike Leigh. The actor is Brenda Bleythyn for her completely honest and, as the Brits would say, spot on portrayal of Cynthia. She's working class single mother London who works in a box factory and lives in a cramped and dingy flat and a state of constant, shrill, bitter, affection- starved conflict with her sullen 20 year old daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). This is a film to admire more than to like. Mike Leigh uses a highly improvisatory technique of working with actors (not unlike the way John Cassavetes used to make his films, I suspect). With skilled actors who virtually create the screenplay in their prepatory improvisations, that element of dramatic films that I, for one (as a former actor myself) prize above all else--emotional truth--is here in great abundance. But that doesn't necessarily create a film that's either entertaining or easy to watch. What it can do, and this one does, is put on the screen some deeply personal and painful emotions that well up from the inner lives of the actors themselves (filtered, of course, through the characters they are playing). You uncover here the lingering, festering, anger and pain that, I suspect, exist in all families but that only see the light of day in occasional horrible explosions that are so painful it's easier to live estranged and bitter than to risk contact and exposure. In this film some of the secrets are even secrets from the people most intimately concerned. Cynthia has kept secret from everyone (except her brother Morris) the fact Roxanne is not her only child. She had had a baby at age 16 that she immediately gave up for adoption. The adoption agency kept secret from her the fact that this child was Black, and Cynthia had just assumed that it was the product of a later sexual encounter and that the baby was premature. The adoptive parents named that baby Hortense and told her when she was seven that she had been adopted. Twenty years later, when her adoptive mother dies, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), now a successful optometrist, decides to seek out her birth mother and is incredulous to learn from the file that her biological mother was white. Hortense, after much soul searching, locates Cynthia and contacts her by telephone. The portion of the film that records the stages in the development of their relationship is truly a tour-de-force of screen acting on the part of both actors. After the horrible shock and denial and insistence that there must be some mistake, eventually they, in effect, fall in (mother/daughter) love. Cynthia's joy and pride in her educated, well-spoken, and very pleasant, new-found daughter is so great she can't stand it. She wants to show her off, so she lies and says she's bringing a friend from work with her to a birthday party that Morris (Timothy Spall) and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan) are giving for Roxanne, not least because Monica wants to show off their new house and middle-class prosperity to Cynthia whom she's been on the outs with for years. After an afternoon of strained conversation and tense pleasantries, Cynthia, tongue loosened by wine, spills the beans that Hortense is her daughter. Once this revelation has been made and its painful consequences ensue, other secrets and past deceptions come pouring forth. The intensity of feeling here is so great that the audience, at least last night, seemed to be very uncomfortable and there was quite a good deal of laughter "in the wrong places," so to speak. At other times the pace rather dragged from the filmmaker's interest in letting the "rhythms of life" set the pace rather than any dictates of dramatic form. Nor does Leigh feel the need to tie up loose ends. He admirably lets the film end (with what in this family passes for a happy ending) without Hortense or the audience ever finding out anything about Hortense's father or the encounter during which she was conceived. Cynthia, who had repressed it for years, will now only say that to talk about it would break her heart. Not even a film as intent as this one is on exposing lies and secrets would be telling the truth if it gave the impression that there weren't always still more lies and secrets where those came from. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.