It is a testimony to a director's creative vision and opus that Secrets and Lies can be most simply identified as a 'Mike Leigh film'. The phrase instantly evokes images of his funny, moving, sympathetic and critical portraits from the wastelands of modern suburban Britain.
'My on-going preoccupation is with families, relationships, parents, children, sex, work, surviving, being born and dying,' Leigh told the International Herald Tribune last year. 'I'm not an intellectual filmmaker. My films are a response to the way people are, the way things are as I experience them. In a way, they are acts of taking the temperature.'
In Secrets and Lies, Leigh returns to familiar territory, but the film represents perhaps his most technically-accomplished and accessible work to date. Interestingly enough, given the fact that Leigh has always been considered a 'very English' director, the major funding for the film came from France's CiBy 2000, a sign of his burgeoning international reputation and acceptance. And the company's faith paid off in Cannes when the film picked up the Palme d'Or and the best actress award for Brenda Blethyn.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense, a young black woman living in London. Upon the death of her adopted mother, she sets out to track down the woman who gave birth to her.
To her surprise, her natural mother, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), turns out to be a white factory worker - a sad single mother who lives in a shabby house.
Reminiscent of Leigh's earlier work, Secrets and Lies captures the humour, warmth and compassion that comprise an essential part of his character and artistic creativity. Naked might have been a tour-de-force, but it was Life is Sweet - whose tone Secrets and Lies echoes - that confirmed Leigh's commercial viability among international art-house audiences. Tim Avis
Prod Co: CiBy 2000/Thin Man Production
Prod: Simon Channing-Williams
Dir/Scr: Mike Leigh
Ph: Dick Pope
Prod des: Alison Chitty
Cos: Maria Price Mus: Andrew Dickson
Ed: Jon Gregory
Cast: Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall
Running time: 141mins
Int Sales: CiBy Sales
Programacion (Screening): 00.00, 23 Sept, Principal; 16.00, 24 Sept, Principal; 22.45, 24 Sept, Astoria 3; 23.00, 25 Sept, Principe 4
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