It might be slightly difficult to think of a two-hour-twenty-two-minute movie in terms of a handy summary, but there was a lot to be summed up from the dozen or so prior entries in the filmography of Mike Leigh: the wide range and the sudden shifts of emotion (the excruciating hilarity, the aching tenderness, the unbearable embarrassment, and points in between); the focus on family, on society, on class; the revelation of character through environment and vocation; the ear for the vernacular; the social gathering as formula for combustion; the dyspeptic musical accompaniment, with its flatulent brass and its groaning lower strings; above all, the unique combination of caricature and compassion (the contradictory combination of snobbery and liberalism). But to get down to cases: Secrets and Lies, for all its breadth of scope, is focussed closely on one smallish family and satellites. Cynthia and Roxanne, mother and daughter, factory worker and street cleaner, live together in slovenly disharmony in London's East End. Cynthia's younger brother Maurice, a studio portrait photographer, is in a childless marriage in a middle-class suburb, more specifically in a frilly Laura Ashley dollhouse, with the barren, stay-at-home Monica. Maurice, feeling bad about his estrangement from his sister and niece, petitions his dictatorial wife with a plan for a reunion barbecue on Roxanne's imminent twenty-first birthday. The Leigh fan, recollecting the seventieth-birthday bash from High Hopes, will have started immediately to rub his palms together in anticipation. He will not be disappointed. There remains to be mentioned one other major family member, whose existence is unknown to Roxanne and unspoken-of by the others, an earlier daughter of Cynthia's given up for adoption at birth. No one, not even Cynthia, knows that this other daughter is black. The latter, a well-bred optometrist by the name of Hortense, having just put her adoptive mother in the ground in the movie's opening scene, gets it into her head to track down her birth mother. At that point, Hortense likewise has no idea of her real mother's different color. The palms of the Leigh fan will be getting quite warm. Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Lesley Manville. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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