![]() ![]() Spall, whom you may remember as the proprietor of the doomed French restaurant in Leigh's “ Life Is Sweet,” is a born conciliator, wanting to make everyone happy and usually failing. He is a photographer specializing in wedding pictures she is a loving woman whose life becomes unbearable for herself and her husband every 28 days. Much of the film is devoted to the domestic life of Maurice and Monica. just look at you!” She claims she has never even slept with a black man, and she is telling the truth, but then a moment comes when she arrives at a startling revelation, and we don't know whether to smile or hold our breaths. “But you can't be my daughter, dearie!” Cynthia exclaims. But she agrees to meet Hortense, and the scene of their meeting-outside a tube station and then in a nearby cafe-is one of the great sequences in all of Mike Leigh's work, based on incredulity, disbelief, memory, embarrassment and acceptance. ![]() The phone rings again, and she approaches it like an animal sure the trap is set to spring. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, dear-there's been some mistake!” says Cynthia. Cynthia mourns the fact that her beloved younger brother Maurice ( Timothy Spall) hasn't called her in more than two years, and blames Maurice's wife Monica ( Phyllis Logan), that “toffee-nosed cow,” for the long silence. She lives in an untidy council house with her daughter Roxanne ( Claire Rushbrook), who works as a street sweeper, is in a foul mood most of the time, and has a boyfriend whom she has thoroughly cowed. We meet the mother, named Cynthia, who is played as a fearful, nervous wreck by Brenda Blethyn (who won the best actress award at Cannes for this performance). ![]() After the death of her adoptive mother, she goes to an adoption agency to discover the name of her birth mother, and thinks there must have been a mistake, since the papers indicate her mother was white. It begins with the black woman, a thirtyish optometrist with the quintessentially British name of Hortense Cumberbatch (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste). Given the deep waters it dives into, “Secrets & Lies” is a good deal funnier and more entertaining than we have any right to expect. The young black woman is the catalyst to change that situation, yes, but her life was fine before the action starts and will continue on an even keel afterward. That would be wrong because it sidesteps the real subject of the film, which is that the mother and her family have been all but destroyed by secrets and lies. It would be easy, but wrong, to describe the plot of “Secrets & Lies” as being about an adopted black woman in London who seeks out her natural birth mother, discovers the woman is white, and arranges to meet her. ![]()
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