By Salim Garami
What's good?
Timothy Spall's character Maurice Purley in Mike Leigh's 1996 Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies is a photographer and every scene we see him at work involves his usually-successful, sometimes-not-as-much attempts to amiably convince his clients to take a big smile before he takes the photo. Sometimes it's a direct appeal and sometimes it's just by making an off-hand joke that catches them. Usually it's preceeded by a very slight window of sadness implying a long and exhaustive story on the subject's part. It feels like a very reflexive move on Mike Leigh's part: Secrets & Lies, like most of Leigh's works, is a humanist tale of some very messy and sometimes sad parts of a large story but Leigh imbues it with a sense of delicate compassion, sometimes injecting a sense of humor about the situations, but always wanting the best for its characters.
It's certainly been his M.O. for ages.
But the story within Secrets & Lies that Leigh handles with delicacy isn't Maurice's necessarily - though we do revolve around him and find ourselves privy to his own sadnesses just as well as the people he shoot - but instead it is the story of the young Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who has just buried her adoptive mother and finds herself with a desire to track down her birth mother. What compels her to seek her birth mother out is not something Leigh really wants to give an answer for so much as pose the question - despite a comfortably successful life as an optometrist, we see hints of how messy her adoptive family may have been, such as an argument between her step-siblings over the late mother's home. And the adoption agent's inquiries as to Hortense's relationship with her stepmother only leads to Hortense's insistence that they loved each other and that's the end of it.
Maybe Hortense deep inside knows that life just isn't that simple, but her search leads her to Maurice's sister Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn). It's not just because Cynthia is clearly a pushed-over working class emotional wreck with a young daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) that has her own anxieties that complicates things, it's also the clear racial disparity between the black Hortense and the white Cynthia.
It's a messy situation where certain characters (Roxanne and Maurice's overbearing wife Monica, played by Phyllis Logan), but life's a mess and that's what Leigh's always been great at proposing within all of his dramas throughout his time as an artist for over five decades. Secrets & Lies just proved itself to be the purest and most humane phrasing of that thesis through an impeccable cast of complex improvised performances aware of their characters enough to make the occasional conflicts feel from genuine perspectives and not because the script demands conflict, including Blethyn who won the Best Actress of Cannes that year, that also made the film the sort of unpredictable and sincere work that it is.
Secrets & Lies is always unafraid to present the characters within it as walking contradictions, with editing and framing determined to be generous with the thoughts we are privy to on its characters, and an overwhelming amount of forgiveness for their destructive tendencies or inability to get it together. This is precisely the sort of film that Leigh deserves to be remembered for.
