The shock of the announcement spreads through the room, jarring loose other family secrets and lies. What is interesting is that there is no sign of racial prejudice the fact that Roxanne is learning that she has a half-sister is quite enough. How this plays out and what it leads to is encompassed in the film's title. And then later, inside around the birthday cake, Cynthia drops her bombshell: Hortense is her daughter. Paul ( Lee Ross), the boyfriend, had only a little mumbled dialogue, but watch him closely: He is terrified, his hands clenching, his chin twitching, as he bolts his food. Cynthia, who brought up Maurice as her 'little brother,' hates Monica, and the feeling is returned. The tension is palpable, and not only because of the unexplained Hortense. Soon comes the second very long, unbroken take, focused on a crowded picnic table in Maurice's backyard, as the guests uneasily settle down. Cynthia urges her daughter to bring her boyfriend: 'I wouldn't know him if he stood up in my soup.' Then she rings up Maurice and asks if she can bring 'a mate from work.' This will be Hortense, who is reluctant to attend a family function where there might be difficulties. They decide to invite them over for Roxanne's 21st birthday. Maurice and Monica, who live in a spacious new house, hardly ever see his sister and her daughter. Why do these scenes exist? They lay the foundations for Maurice's outburst near the end, beginning with 'I've spent my life trying to make people happy.' Then there is an odd visit from a down-and-out drunk who sold Maurice the business. They're interesting in themselves a woman whose face was scarred in a traffic crash says she wants to look 'as bad as possible' for insurance purposes. An unusual amount of screen time is devoted to the photographs Maurice takes in his portrait studio. Scenes of the two women, together and apart, are intercut with scenes of Maurice and Monica, childless, with a coldness between them. They're acting in real time, creating a new relationship on the spot, Cynthia feeling the first inner stirrings of this daughter who is an optometrist, when her layabout Roxanne is a street sweeper. The way the two women play this scene is fascinating. Why, look at me.' When she first saw her adoption papers, Hortense also thought there was a mistake: 'It says here my mother is white.' Hortense and Cynthia go into a cafe for a cup of tea, and here begins the film's first long unbroken shot, the camera never moving from a medium two-shot, no one else ever in the frame, Cynthia saying she had never slept with a black man ('I'd remember something like that, wouldn't I?'). At first she cannot believe her daughter is black: 'There's been some mistake, sweetheart. Cynthia fearfully agrees to meet with her. This secret has been guarded not only by Cynthia but by her younger brother, Maurice ( Timothy Spall), and his wife, Monica ( Phyllis Logan).Ĭynthia breaks into tears and hangs up on Hortense.

After the death of her mother, she decides to seek her birth mother, and the long-held secret of Cynthia's first child is threatened. Hortense ( Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a black woman, now in her late 20s, an optometrist. This happens when she receives a phone call from Hortense Cumberbatch, who Cynthia bore out of wedlock at 16 and gave up for adoption without ever seeing her.

Cynthia seems an anthology of raw sadness and worry, but she will be transformed when her worst nightmare comes true. That's true of Brenda Blethyn's performance in 'Secrets & Lies' as Cynthia Purley, a factory worker who rattles discontentedly around the little rowhouse she was born in and regards Roxanne, her 20-year-old daughter, with despair. Characters who seem over the top in one scene have a way of rounding out later in a film. In the 17 years between features, he perfected what he instinctively began with: tragicomic portraits of discontented people in trying circumstances, and an embarrassment in social situations that borders on pathology.Īlthough he makes some characters into caricatures, there is a compassion in his work that acts like a safety net. This turned out to be the film's first review Leigh had been ignored at home in England. When I saw 'Bleak Moments,' I knew I was watching a masterpiece by a great director and wrote a long review for the Sun-Times. In between, he worked constantly for television and the theater but couldn't get a film financed because the backers wanted to see a script, and of course he didn't have one. He made his second, ' High Hopes,' in 1988. Leigh, born 1943, made his first feature, ' Bleak Moments,' in 1971.

Secrets and lies film