Secrets and Lies
VHS (Close-Captioned): 142 min.
DVD (Close-Captioned): 106 min.
1996, Beverly Hills, CA: CBS Fox Video/Twentieth Century Fox
Home Entertainment
Rated: R
ISBN: 0792136047 (VHS)
ISBN: 0792190726 (DVD)
$9.98 (VHS); $17.59 (DVD) at amazon.com
Summary:
After her adoptive parents die, a young black woman seeks out her natural birth mother only to discover her mother is white. Equally shocked to learn her daughter she gave up for adoption is black, Cynthia insists it's a mistake. But she soon realizes it's true and when she springs her newfound daughter on the rest of the family, the resulting chaos leads to a series of secrets and lies being revealed at last.
Reviews:
Transcendent and moving, not to mention blisteringly funny, Secrets and Lies is something very special indeed. At first glance, Leigh's most accessible and heartfelt film sounds like a soap opera: Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a lonely, boozy, white-trash factory wage slave who takes a call from Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a stranger claiming to be the daughter Cynthia gave up at birth. They agree to meet at a cafe. Hortense, 27, is a dignified London optometrist. She is also black. Cynthia is unbelieving, ashamed. "It ain't true, sweet'art," she says, her cockney accent thick with panic as she launches into a crying jag that ends in a devastating realization of the truth.
The writer and director handle the ensuing explosion of laughs, tears, rage and reconciliation with rare skill and immediacy. Leigh, a world-class filmmaker at the top of his form, has sometimes been accused of patronizing his working-stiff characters. But the pain of Maurice's cry -- "Why do the people I love most in the world hate each other's guts?" -- has a poignancy that hardly smacks of exploitation. At Cannes, Leigh said his award was "encouraging for those of us who are trying to make films about people, relationships, real life, love, passion, caring and all the things that matter." Secrets and Lies matters. –Rolling Stone
British director Mike Leigh has an unorthodox approach to making movies, one that he describes as "idiosyncratic, bordering on the eccentric." He starts with no script, just a vague idea. Then, he casts his actors, who spend months improvising the story, inventing it even as they are filming. But there is nothing loose about the final product. Leigh directs with astounding rigor, structuring the performances into a symphonic whole as complex as the most tightly scripted narrative--and with an emotional realism unparalleled in contemporary cinema. Although Leigh has a method, he does not have a style, for each film becomes its own creature. Three years ago, he made Naked, a dark odyssey into millennial angst that revolved around an incandescent performance by David Thewlis. Leigh's new film, Secrets and Lies, is a sprawling tale of family anguish, a drama that teeters on the high wire between comedy and pathos without ever losing its balance. –-Maclean’s
Awards:
Winner of the 49thCannes Film Festival Golden Palm Award