CINEMA: Charl Blignaut
As I was leaving Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, it occurred to me that the impact of the movie pretty much depends on how screwed up your mother was. Or, for that matter, exactly how much it screwed your mother up to give birth to this life that would become a shadow for the rest of her days.
It was the only way I could justify finding myself moved to tears at unexpected moments throughout the movie. It was either that or the copious amounts of booze that had flowed at the opening night cocktail do.
In retrospect, most of the movie’s emotional clout probably has to do with Brenda Blethyn’s astounding performance as Cynthia, a white trash factory worker and single mother whose abandoned black daughter, the optician Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), tracks her down and resolves to become an active part of her destiny.
But it’s not your standard adopted-kid- goes-through-crisis-traces-real-parents
kind of thing. It’s gritty and beautiful and funny and sad and even if you hate experimental movies, you really shouldn’t let a Mike Leigh go by. He’s Britain’s most admired director – among many critics and a smallish, though reverential, fan club.
His last three films – High Hopes, Life is Sweet and Naked – received accolades and awards. With the exception of Naked, a brilliant, bleak and generally fucked-up tale of three slackers trying to cope with the alienation of modern times, Leigh sticks to a small urban world centred around the family.
What makes Secrets and Lies different, however, is that Leigh is starting to command bigger budgets, thus has more time to develop projects. The meticulously real and varied characters and plot in Secrets and Lies attest to a bigger picture and a tastier slice of life than before.
As is true of the entire cast, Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste (both nominated for Oscars this year) are brilliant tools for Leigh’s method. And also for his madness. He enters his projects without a storyline, let alone a script, and improvises. “Mike simply got in touch with me and said he was doing a film,” said Jean-Baptiste in a recent interview. “We rehearsed for six months, but only in the last stages did it become clear who I was.”
Unsurprisingly, not all actors can cope with the method, which developed from his theatre and TV work. “I could never have star actors. Stars only do a film if they’ve checked the script before,” said Leigh in an interview after he and Blethyn scooped the top awards for Secrets and Lies at the 1996 Cannes film festival.
The method’s been down for years; it’s the madness that really gels here. Leigh has previously been attacked by critics for his defensiveness when criticised; his cold view of humanity (particularly women) and his romanticised notions of the working class (he is, in fact, himself of a middle- class Jewish extract, not working class as he likes to suggest).
But it is these same aspects which inform his individuality: the delicious comic tension that develops between his misanthropy and his philanthropy; between his users and abusers; and between his upper and lower classes.
Secrets and Lies opened on circuit on May 1. It was the 1996 Cannes Palme d’Or winner