Film
Secrets and Lies
- Director
- Mike Leigh
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 136 mins
Back in 1996, Mike Leigh returned to familiar bittersweet comic territory with this flawed yet acutely observed tale of ordinary folks with festering secrets and a penchant for that great Leigh speciality: the excruciating social gathering. Following the death of her adoptive parents, middle class black optometrist Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) decides to track down her biological mother and is shocked to learn that the woman is white. Her arrival in the midst of this ordinary, quietly miserable English family (Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn, etc) brings its dysfunctional members’ repressed resentments bubbling to the surface in familiar toe-curlingly funny fashion. Unlike most of Leigh’s previous films, the characterisations and performances here are spot on, without a single grotesque caricature to upset the dramatic balance. But at a bum-punishing two-and-a-half hours, it drags on rather too long, while the remorselessly mournful cello soundtrack underlines all the domestic misery perhaps a little too emphatically. Nonetheless, this one bagged five Oscar nominations and was a huge box office hit.
It’s back on screen in the Watershed’s epic Of Grudge and Gumption: British Working Class on Film Sunday brunch season.
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