Secrets and Lies
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Nevertheless there has been a discernible change in Leigh’s work since his last dysfunctional-family opus, Life Is Sweet–a change well described by Australian critic Adrian Martin in a recent letter to me: “I think that as a certain angry anti-Thatcher 80s politics has drained from Leigh’s work, he has gravitated to either the bombastic nihilism of Naked (a film I have incredibly mixed feelings about) or the soft-heartedness of Secrets and Lies.” Put somewhat differently, the political anger that first gave way to metaphysical hopelessness in Naked has now been transmuted into a more standard drama about repression and self-deception. These are problems curable by personal means alone, without reference to a wider political context or much recourse to the sort of multilayered psychological ambiguity found in the work of Maurice Pialat or John Cassavetes.
Monica proposes to Maurice that they throw a 21st birthday party for Roxanne; shortly after that Hortense phones Cynthia, who initially refuses to speak to her, then reluctantly agrees to meet her outside Holborn tube station. After a traumatic first encounter–when Cynthia’s denial that Hortense is her daughter neatly matches the viewer’s difficulty with the same premise–Cynthia and Hortense develop a warm rapport and start spending time together. At the climactic birthday party, Cynthia arrives with Hortense, whom she introduces as a friend from work, and eventually the “secrets and lies”–about Hortense’s true identity and about Maurice and Monica’s marriage–spill out.
I also like the film for its relative largesse to a dysfunctional family struggling for mutual acceptance. Cynthia is a mess, barreling her way through the story, but it’s her messiness that ultimately exposes the family wounds and therefore allows them to begin to heal. If Roxanne, with her perpetual expression of pinched distaste, registers at times like a too-easy replay of the bulimic daughter in Life Is Sweet, at least Leigh is thoughtful enough to provide her with a boyfriend and an uncle who persuade her to grow beyond her mother’s fatalistic projections and self-image. Even Monica is allowed to redeem herself somewhat in her final scene.
