Secrets and Lies

Secrets and Lies this year walked off with the Palme d'Or ahead of Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves". On the face of it, Mike Leigh's film was more to my taste, but the question is whether Trier ought not to have had the Palme for his daring, his originality. Secrets and Lies is hardly overwhelmingly innovative, after all. Mike Leigh has continued down a track he began many years ago with harsh but witty social realism . For example, there are quite a few similarities between Secrets and Lies and "Life is Sweet". Both are about strained family relationships marked by secrets and lies.

The film has not one but several main characters. A family plays the lead. Cynthia may well be at the centre as the link between the various family members. She is a worn-out factory worker and single mother with a 21-year-old daughter, Roxanne, with whom she has a poor relationship.

Cynthia also has a bad, or rather an almost non-existent, relationship with her younger brother Maurice, who has fought his way free of his working-class background and made something of himself, namely a portrait photographer. Cynthia is not exactly popular with her sister-in-law Monica, who, it turns out, compensates for being unable to have children by creating the perfect home.

Hortense is yet another family member, at first one unknown to the others, until she contacts Cynthia, her real mother, after the death of her adoptive parents. Both Cynthia and Hortense get a surprise at their first meeting. Cynthia was not aware that the baby was the result of a one-night stand with a black man, and that Hortense is therefore black. Nor does poor Cynthia quite match Hortense's idea of her real mother, for she has grown up in secure circumstances in a loving and harmonious family. The women nevertheless decide to see more of each other, with the result that Cynthia blossoms. She is proud of her well-educated daughter, who evidently respects her for who she is.

On Roxanne's birthday the family gathers at Maurice and Monica's. Cynthia has persuaded Hortense to come along and introduces her as a colleague from work, but it is from drunk people that you hear the truth. The film's gigantic climax is the great soul-baring scene in which all the lies and secrets are settled and all the truths come out. The family members' confrontation results in tears and gnashing of teeth, but ultimately also in reconciliation and spiritual cleansing.

It can be hard to cope with these violent emotional outbursts. Should you laugh or should you cry? But perhaps that reaction in the audience is entirely intended by the director. Cynthia is, after all, a tragicomic figure who appeals to both sympathy and laughter. Moreover, it is typical of Leigh's films that there is humour in the midst of misery. Otherwise it would be unbearable. Still, I remain of the view that the showdown scene is too overwrought to seem realistic.

With this film Leigh once again shows his great insight into human psychology, both as regards the film's characters and the actors he directs. Brenda Blethyn thus deservedly won the prize for Best Actress.