Secrets & Lies (1996) The Other Big British Film of 1996 (Review)

Britain in the 1990s. What a time to be alive. We had Britpop, we had the dawn of a new era in terms of New Labour, we had great fashions, we had great art, and we almost, almost, had football coming home. We also had some great movies too. When we look back on the British film industry of the mid to late ’90s now, it is rightly and inevitably with a great deal of fondness. There was suddenly a spirit of optimism and a genuine interest in British cinema.

This in itself was nothing new, what with the proliferation of the British New Wave movement of the 1960s, and a brief revival in the early ’80s that was to see Chariots of Fire screenwriter, the avuncular professional Northerner Colin Welland, clutch one of the four Oscars the film won and proclaim – a little prematurely – that “The British are Coming!” The fortunes of our industry have been cyclical enough to crest more or less every fifteen years and, for a decade at least, Film 4 had been producing original and exemplary work before coming of age just as Britannia was once again proclaimed to be ‘Cool’ and ready to rule the waves. And riding the crest of that wave in 1996 was of course Trainspotting which saw director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald, build upon the success of their previous film Shallow Grave and the renewed interest in Britain that arrived in the wake of the astonishingly popular 1994 smash Four Weddings and a Funeral. These successes would open the floodgates for hit homegrown movies like Brassed Off, The Full Monty, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, as well as a glut of films that ranged from middling to awful but were at least of the zeitgeist. But for now, 1996 and British cinema, belonged to them.

Or did it? Not to detract from the huge and well-deserved success of Trainspotting, one of the most important British movies ever, but to focus on that as the sole success story of 1996 would be erroneous. Trainspotting may have got the buzz, it may have gained the column inches and it may have proven to the world that the British film industry now walked with a newly confident swagger to rival even the simian gait of the Gallagher brothers, but it was the unprepossessingly gnomic Mike Leigh – a man who might conceivably make a film about actual trainspotters – who quietly stole a march on the Trainspotting juggernaut. At the Cannes Film Festival, Boyle’s film was screened out of competition whilst Leigh’s sixth feature film Secrets & Lies beat off stiff competition from the likes of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves and David Cronenberg’s Crash to win the prestigious Palmed d’Or that year. Like Trainspotting, Secrets & Lies went on to score hugely in the US where it was viewed as his most accessible film to date. Leigh, whose cottage industry approach of ploughing of one’s own furrow with a specific creative and improvisational method of making films with the same repertory of actors, had shown that paying little heed to the fashions and trends of the day was the only way to prevail.

Anyone who follows me on Letterboxd will know that I am a huge fan of Mike Leigh. M’colleagues here at The Geek Show seldom offer me the opportunity to review his films, and probably with good reason. But the fools, the fools!, have allowed me to write about the Criterion release of the film that is generally regarded to be the director’s enduring masterpiece. Prepare yourselves for a review that is hardly going to be impartial.

Secrets & Lies is best described as a film about family. It stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Hortense, a well-educated black middle-class optometrist who, as the film opens, we see has just lost her mother. Having known from an early age that she was adopted, the death of her parent (her father has previously passed) represents the opportunity for a new chapter in her life – a chance to trace her birth mother. Enter Cynthia, played by Brenda Blethyn, a working-class white woman and single-parent to Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), a roadsweeper approaching twenty-one. Theirs is a somewhat fractious relationship which isn’t helped when the possessive Cynthia learns that she has secretly been dating a scaffolder called Paul (Lee Ross). Cynthia’s clinginess is a symptom of her feeling estranged from her younger brother Maurice (Timothy Spall), who she effectively brought up, between raising Roxanne and caring for their father, when their mother died. A successful portrait and wedding photographer with his own business, Maurice lives in the suburbs with his wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan). Theirs looks like the perfect upwardly mobile lifestyle and marriage, but it too holds its own tragic and unrevealed problems that may point towards the real reason for their estrangement from Cynthia and Roxanne. As Hortense and Cynthia are somewhat tentatively reunited and Maurice reaches out to his sister once more, the secrets and lies that have plagued the family will rise excoriatingly to the surface during a barbecue held at Maurice’s for Roxanne’s 21st.

As his sixth cinematic release, Secrets & Lies came after the much-praised Naked, a raw and savage indictment of over a decade of Tory rule and poisonous misogyny. For many, Leigh included, Naked was an opportunity to do something a little different, to surprise audiences who perhaps thought they knew what a Mike Leigh film was. Brimming with confidence and coming into cinematic maturity, the success which that film received allowed Leigh to return home to domesticity, albeit using a different approach than the traditional family set-up which audiences might have expected. Adoption, specifically the adoption of black babies from white mothers – a common practice in the 1960s when mixed-race families were frowned upon – had long been a theme Leigh had wanted to explore. His belief that the subject would provide a rich seam of drama was absolutely correct. Adoption is not only a universal experience, it is also, for many countries, a taboo one. Leigh points to the success of the film in countries where tracing birth parents was illegal – Italy, France, Spain, South American countries – as proof that he was right to trust his storytelling instincts. Secrets & Lies perhaps wasn’t a gamble like Naked was, but it paid off nonetheless.

It’s not just about adoption either. Secrets & Lies is a film about identity, of needing others in one’s life to feel whole. It’s also a deeply metaphorical film. Maurice and Hortense’s occupations, photographer and optometrist respectively, aren’t just plucked from thin air; they allow Leigh the opportunity to use the sense of image as a metaphorical exploration of what we see, what we perceive to be true, and what people may want us to see. One of the delights of Secrets & Lies is seeing a plethora of recognisable faces being corralled into presenting an idealised version of themselves to be preserved forever on the mantlepiece. Seeing so many actors, many of whom played pivotal roles in past Leigh productions, appear for just a few seconds at a time before Maurice’s camera, and knowing full well that each character will have their one backstory and life as befits Leigh’s painstakingly detailed method, is the greatest Easter egg for a Mike Leigh fan. It affords tantalising prospects too; given that Leigh isn’t above suggesting his films occasionally belong in the same universe (The woman played by Angela Curran, whose car David Thewlis steals in the opening moments of Leigh’s previous film Naked, is said to be the same character Curran played in his 1977 Play for Today, The Kiss of Death) I personally like to think that the ‘uneasy man’, played by Anthony O’Donnell, who is having his photograph taken with his partner, played by Denise Orita, is actually O’Donnell returning to the role of Nuts in May‘s hapless Ray.

I mentioned earlier a sense of Leigh coming into cinematic maturity here and that’s something worthy of explanation. Whilst Leigh had been making films at this point in his life for over a quarter of a century, the majority of them – some ten, in fact, fifteen if you include the series of Five Minute Films he made too – were for television. His first film, 1970’s Bleak Moments, may have been made for cinema, but it wasn’t until 1983’s Meantime, itself made for Channel 4 television, that a film of Leigh’s once again graced the big screen and we had to wait until 1987’s High Hopes for what was officially his second cinematic feature – a full seventeen years after his debut. Secrets & Lies is therefore the result of Leigh working for the medium of cinema for almost a decade. As a result, it is certainly a film that takes what Leigh had previously been working on and honing it to its most successful execution. In essence, this is arguably the dramatic revelation or hand grenade tossed into domesticity, as evinced in that bracing final act around the aforementioned family barbecue.

Needless to say the core relationship and performances from Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Brenda Blethyn as reunited daughter and mother are absolute corkers that instantly engage the audience. Blethyn’s Cynthia is a neurotic, tragicomic creation that is never less than utterly, almost unbearably authentic. In some regards, she is a distant cousin of Gloria, whom Blethyn played in Leigh’s 1980 Play For Today, Grown Ups. Like that character, who in the most embarrassing of fashions refused to leave her younger sister be after she had flown the nest to set up home with her boyfriend, Cynthia’s worst fear is of being left to live alone. Her tragedy of course is that she cannot see that her clinginess is the very thing leading her towards the isolation she fears. Her dysfunctional relationship with Roxanne, her poorly articulated concern for her relationship with Paul or of her not fulfilling her potential, are born of an anxiety that history may repeat itself, and indeed one of the film’s most amusing scenes sees Cynthia try to offer, in her sledgehammer, tin-eared way, advice on contraception – “I’ve got a Dutch cap floating about upstairs somewhere” is a line that will always make me laugh no matter how many times I hear it. It is some relief therefore that we see her, after a characteristically tentative start, reunited with Hortense, and once she has done, she becomes almost like a new woman, blooming and confident. Marianne Jean-Baptiste – whom Leigh regretted not casting in Naked, but with whom he quickly made amends with by casting her in his stageplay It’s a Great Big Shame! and, immediately after that, this – has arguably the hardest role here. In the hands of both a lesser filmmaker and performer, Hortense could be reduced to a narrative device – the ticking timebomb waiting to erupt in the final act – and a ‘straight-man’ or foil for Cynthia. Thankfully none of these come across from Leigh or Jean-Baptiste. In Leigh’s case, he is careful to showcase scenes that show Hortense’s life beyond the actual necessities of the plot, whether that’s depicting her visibly upset at her mother’s funeral, frustrated with her siblings, at work, performing an eyesight test for a child, drinking wine and chatting with her friend Dionne (Michele Austin, who also starred in It’s a Great Big Shame!) about sorting things – ie her life – out, or just goofing about with Cynthia and discussing the merits of Sylvester Stallone’s physical appearance. All of these things show that whilst Hortense is a seriously organised professional woman, she is still a woman of course. She is emotional and she has feelings. Meanwhile, Jean-Baptise is a skilled actor who ensures the character is multidimensional and one which the audience will root for. It’s no surprise really that Hollywood came calling for her solely off the back of this movie.

Interestingly, the sequence with Hortense and Dionne was, along with a scene depicting Timothy Spall’s uneasy reunion with a shambolic fellow photographer who once owned the business that he does now, were a sticking point with the film’s Parisian backers, Ciby 2000. Deciding that these were wholly redundant to the plot, they demanded they be excised from the movie, a suggestion that Leigh wholly rejected. A stand-off between the filmmaker and the financiers followed that became deeply acrimonious. Ciby 2000 threatened Leigh with pulling out of the movie and even banning its submission to Cannes. At significant cost to themselves, the backers elected to screen Leigh’s cut to a test audience in a three-hundred seat multiplex in Slough and again to American distributors in London. When the ‘test’ audience and the Hollywood moneymen both sided with Leigh, that nothing should be cut, Ciby 2000 were forced to eat humble pie. The film did go to Cannes and well, we know what happened next. Personally, it would have been disastrous to remove those two scenes because they reveal so much about each character. I’ve already explained why such a scene was necessary for Hortense, but for Maurice – a truly fine, subtle performance from Spall – the timing of this once-contentious scene is key; Maurice’s confrontation with the washed-up Stuart (Ron Cook) who begins to complain that he has done well for himself out of his old business, comes immediately after Maurice has photographed a young woman who has been facially disfigured as a result of car crash. Played by Emma Amos, this woman was once a beauty consultant, someone for whom looks were especially important, and whose trauma and altered appearance has resulted in bitterness and anger. In this one scene we see Maurice engage emotionally and empathetically in a manner that has previously eluded him at home when faced with the extreme menstrual cramps that blight Monica and affect her temperament. That Leigh chooses to follow this minor revelation up with the arrival of Stuart, which requires Maurice to defend himself against the alcoholic’s unfounded protestations and be firm and unwavering for once, allows us to see facets of the character we might otherwise not expect.

Quite apart from the film reaching the zeitgeist in the peculiar shape of a reference to it in the Spiceworld movie (in the closing credits, Claire Rushbrook, who appears as the band’s PA, is seen greeted by Baby and Ginger’s Spice’s best Blethyn impression; “Awight, Sweet’art” they drawl to their amusement, whilst Scary Spice tries desperately to place where she’s heard it before), the international commercial success of Secrets & Lies is arguably the closest Leigh came to be courted by Hollywood; a fate which he is completely uninterested in. Indeed, he tells a story of one Hollywood producer phoning him at home with a view to remaking Uncle Tom’s Cabin! As well as winning the Palme d’Or, the film bagged several awards and a multitude of nominations, including five Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay. It won none, having been scuppered by the Anglo-American production The English Patient, which walked away with a staggering nine Oscars that year. The success of The English Patient is telling; by that point in the timeline of Cool Britannia, Hollywood became interested in telling quintessentially English stories – essentially repackaging our own tales and selling them back to us. The contemporary flavour that the British film industry delighted in was however mostly discarded (even Leigh, eager to capitalise on his success had wound the clock back to produce his long-held ambition of a Gilbert and Sullivan biopic, 1999’s Topsy-Turvy) as the likes of big players like Miramax – whose LA Confidential was dismissed out of competition by a 1997 Cannes jury that included Leigh, a decision the disgraced Harvey Weinstein was said to be furious about – preferred a stereotypical, romanticised Ye Olde England, the pinnacle of which perhaps came along in 1999 when a successful and highly controversial awards campaign led to Shakespeare in Love taking home seven Oscars.

By the start of the new millennium, the shine had gone from the red, white and blue of Cool Britannia’s Union Jack. Britpop was dead, the England football team still hadn’t won anything and the NME had a cover depicting Tony Blair with the headline “Ever Had the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated?”. The promises of just a few years earlier had either failed to be delivered or had simply withered on the vines of time. Leigh’s 2002 film All or Nothing arguable encapsulates that feeling of despondency and disappointment more than most. Set in a dreary Greenwich council estate dwarfed by the New Labour folly of the Millennium Dome and full of overlooked, forgotten families, it served as a stark and potent reminder of the left behind which Tony’s people – the trendy middle-class, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ London cliques, didn’t wish to be reminded of. They didn’t want to hear about the mid to late 1990s having been a false dawn. Faithful to their leader, the glitterati of the day, led by the then host of the BBC’s Film review programme, Jonathan Ross, rubbished it. But All or Nothing, which boasts another phenomenal performance from Spall and surprising one from a young James Corden, is a film worthy of rediscovery. It may be a hard watch, but you can trace the mess we are in now from the sense of inequality dramatised in that film. The bubble didn’t just burst, it didn’t even appear on the horizon of those characters.

Often accused of being pretentious, the Style Council chose to face down these allegations in 1987 by promoting their album The Cost of Loving with a non-linear musical satire on British identity in the age of Thatcherism, narrated by a pre-Reverend Richard Coles. Surprisingly, this did not stop people from calling them pretentious, and the resulting film JerUSAlem (it is our sad duty to confirm that yes, you saw what they did there) vanished from sight.

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