Roxanne, even though she has a boyfriend, Paul (Lee Ross), and Cynthia gets on her nerves, is miffed and mystified when her mother starts not only going out to meet ‘a friend’ but also making an effort to look nice. It’s a novel experience for Cynthia to feel wanted, to have someone say nice things to and about her. But both want to meet again, and soon get to enjoy one another’s company. At their first meeting, Cynthia refuses to believe this can be her daughter until confronted with the evidence of Hortense’s birth certificate. When Hortense first makes phone contact, Cynthia hangs up and, although she subsequently agrees to see Hortense, she’s scared stiff of doing so. Their reunion does more than get Cynthia out of the house where she and Roxanne bicker non-stop. This party is the climax of Secrets & Lies and, by the time it comes round, Hortense has given unhappy, maudlin Cynthia a new lease of life. He and Monica are soon to host a twenty-first-birthday party for her. Roxanne, whose father was never around when she was growing up, is like a daughter to Maurice. He and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan) have a swish home in the London suburbs but no children of their own. Cynthia’s younger brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), runs a successful photography business. She lives in a poky terraced house in East London with Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), her daughter from a subsequent relationship, who sweeps streets for the council. Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn), in her late forties, has a job in a cardboard box factory. There’s no information about her father but Hortense finds out the identity and astonishing ethnicity of her mother. Her adoptive mother’s death is the trigger for investigating her biological parentage. (Unlikely she’d have had the same surname if Leigh had made Secrets & Lies a few years later!) The film begins with the funeral of the (Black) woman who raised Hortense, and with whom she enjoyed a very good relationship. Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), in her late twenties, is attractive, quietly self-possessed and professionally successful – she works as an optometrist. The daughter she gave up for adoption is not. Secrets & Lies remains unique in the Leigh screen oeuvre in that race is a central theme. This story of a young London woman, adopted as a baby, who makes contact with her biological mother, has a conventional dramatic structure and is emotionally involving as no other Leigh film before it had been, and only Vera Drake (2004), perhaps his finest work, has been since. Like Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies seemed at the time of its original release a new departure for Mike Leigh, though in a very different way.
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