Two women, who have just met, sit side by side in a drab London cafe near a tube station. The younger woman, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), has told the older, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), that she is her daughter, given up for adoption 28 years ago. Cynthia curdles in disbelief, for she is white, Hortense black. "I don't mean nothin' by it, darlin'," Cynthia protests in her tiny voice, "but I ain't never been with a black man in my life." She stares into the void, and then a chill comes over her stricken face--you can almost see the room temperature drop--as the truth collapses on her. She dissolves in tears as her daughter sits numbly beside her. Welcome to the family, Hortense.
The scene, from the film Secrets & Lies, is a vintage Mike Leigh moment--a whirl of comedy and soap opera, of bruising tenderness and bravura acting, with the immediacy of real life heightened into the craft of movie art. As Blethyn lets the waterworks flow, Leigh's camera holds on her and Jean-Baptiste for nearly eight purging minutes. Blethyn's heroic work won her the Best Actress prize this year at the Cannes Film Festival. And Secrets & Lies was named Best Film at Cannes. This week it opens the New York Film Festival and will have its premiere in other major cities over the next six weeks.
Leigh has been "devising" films, as he puts it, for 25 years, since the aptly titled Bleak Moments. Unable to secure studio financing, he made films for the BBC and Channel 4, where he carved out his own dramatic genre: working-class Brits scraping each other's skin with their verbal aggressions. Since the late '80s he has worked on the big screen. Some of his films (High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked) have earned him critics' awards and a small, passionate U.S. following. He has received museum retrospectives and is the subject of Michael Coveney's comprehensive, reverent biography The World According to Mike Leigh (HarperCollins). But Secrets & Lies could be his first movie to break through to a wide audience. It is easy to imagine dropping into a mall this fall and hearing America sob along with Cynthia.
What viewers will discover is a long (2 hrs. 16 min.), absorbing and ultimately sunny comedy-drama that treats all its characters scrupulously and generously. Cynthia, a factory worker, has another daughter, balky Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), "with a face like a slapped arse," and a younger brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), whom she raised but to whom she has not spoken in two years. "Cynthia's really very capable," notes Blethyn, "although not the brightest." So when Hortense shows up, it is a shock and an opportunity. Secrets will be revealed, and lies made truth, at Roxanne's 21st-birthday party, held by Maurice and his stressful wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). Catharsis is achieved a mite speedily, but the family has earned so much pity and goodwill, we want them all just to have a big hug.