Secrets & Lies: Seen and Not Seen

Much of Secrets & Lies’ power derives from the believable richness of its characters—a product of the idiosyncratic process by which Leigh shapes his films. Following casting, the director begins by working in close collaboration with each of the actors individually, in a quest to creatively invent his or her character—in the case of Secrets & Lies, Blethyn worked ten-hour shifts in a box factory, while Jean-Baptiste attended optometry classes at a university. Then, Leigh brings the characters together. With Secrets & Lies, he started with Cynthia and Maurice, working with Blethyn and Spall to create the details of their mutual lives, before introducing Monica, and then Roxanne—the Purley family unit. After three months, Leigh felt the time was right to bring in Hortense, whom he had until then been developing with Jean-Baptiste separately. Blethyn, understandably, has said that, during this stage of the making of Secrets & Lies, she was surprised when she first met the actor playing her daughter. Only during the subsequent process of rehearsal—and once the period of shooting has simultaneously commenced—does Leigh bring into existence each sequence through structuring and writing. His films are often praised for their seemingly improvisational qualities, but once filming has begun, no spontaneous speech is allowed.

In Secrets & Lies, this painstaking process bore its richest fruits to date. The film received the most consistently strong reviews of Leigh’s career, enjoyed box-office success on both sides of the Atlantic, and received a great deal of awards recognition. Several months before Jean-Baptiste became the first Black British actor to be nominated for an Academy Award, Secrets & Lies was a big winner at Cannes, taking home the Palme d’Or, the best actress award for Blethyn’s performance, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. This last award, inaugurated at the festival in 1974 by a network of Christian film professionals, seeks to honor works that show “the power of film to reveal the mysterious depths of human beings through what concerns them, their hurts and failings as well as their hopes.” Though Secrets & Lies is a secular—and occasionally profane—work, it’s difficult to conjure a more fitting description of the film’s achievement than the one provided by the Ecumenical Jury.

Themes of vision and perception—of the self and of others—run throughout Secrets & Lies in currents both obvious and subtle. In the case of Maurice, they are literal: his role as a portrait photographer is to cajole his subjects into appearing, if only for a moment, as their best selves, so that this positive image may be frozen in time, and perhaps referred back to when things get tough. It is interesting to consider Secrets & Lies as a period piece from an era before social media had facilitated—and quickly normalized—the instant self-curation of one’s own image. Were the film made today, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Roxanne maintaining a splenetic Twitter account, Monica posting pictures of her pristine house on Instagram, or Cynthia clogging up Facebook walls with well-meaning but factually inaccurate news items. Though, given her deep sense of isolation, perhaps Cynthia would be the likeliest of all the characters to gravitate toward the idea of—and benefit the most from—an online community.

In the film’s early stages, there is a sequence that may initially seem amusingly throwaway but that, when studied closely, illuminates the humanist-miniaturist magic for which its creator is so justly famed. Following an establishing shot of the exterior of Maurice’s studio, Leigh cuts to the interior, and a fixed shot from the perspective of the camera that Maurice uses to take portraits. A family of four ready themselves for their shot, and the composition is instantly striking, offering a window onto the family dynamic. While father and son appear utterly miserable in the background, and grandmother looks on beatifically in the foreground, mother holds the center brightly, with upright poise and radiant patience. Maurice strolls into frame, approaches the flustered patriarch (regular Leigh cast member Peter Wight), adjusts his tie, and removes the newspaper protruding from his pocket. Maurice walks back behind his camera, out of the shot, and takes the picture. With the photographer absent from the frame, we effectively assume his point of view behind the camera, a canny strategy through which Leigh helps us to identify with Maurice’s perspective—he and the watchful Hortense are the film’s most centered, emotionally reliable characters. Maurice, whose life’s work involves directing micronarratives for posterity, may here also be interpreted as a surrogate for Leigh.

But it’s only later in the film that the true resonance of these images becomes apparent. We discover, in a wrenching scene, the underlying reason for Maurice and Monica’s problems: Monica is unable to bear children—they’ve been trying for fifteen years. “It’s almost destroyed our relationship, and you know it,” says an exasperated Maurice in front of the whole family at Roxanne’s birthday party. In this light, the earlier flashes of fertility manifest become reminders for Maurice—and remember, we have assumed his perspective from behind the camera—of what he can never have. There’s nothing especially remarkable about this situation: such things happen, and people find ways to manage and occlude their pain every day. But how many filmmakers find ways to articulate these complex emotional dynamics with such understated grace?

The issue of perception is central to Leigh’s most daring decision in Secrets & Lies, which was in part inspired by his desire to tackle the subject of adoption, and to, for the first time in a substantial way, feature a Black character in one of his films—one who avoided the pervasive stereotypes of the day, which trapped Black actors in a cycle of playing criminals and drug addicts. Like Maurice’s, Hortense’s occupation explicitly concerns vision: as an optometrist, her job is to help others see clearly. In an early scene that helps to economically establish Hortense’s calm, positive demeanor, Leigh shows Hortense at work, where she develops a swift rapport with a young patient. As the film proceeds, it is Hortense who, in search of her biological parentage, embarks upon the most profound journey of seeing.

Upon the film’s release, many Black viewers took issue with the casting of Marianne Jean-Baptiste, including British critic Karen Alexander, who described Jean-Baptiste, a dark-skinned Black woman, as “phenotypically unconvincing” in the role of a mixed-race woman. (As the son of a Black father and a white mother, I must concur with this assessment, although it has never prevented me from marveling at Jean-Baptiste’s deeply charismatic performance.) Leigh reacted angrily to some critics’ suggestions that the film lacked authenticity in its treatment of racial matters. “Again the idiots in some quarters have come out waving their flags and saying, ‘Well, it shirks its responsibility, and why aren’t they intolerant towards her, why didn’t they behave negatively?’—as though everybody would be racist in the world, which is not the case in 1996,” Leigh told Salon that year. My reservation, however, is not that the white characters don’t discriminate against Hortense (although there is one amusing moment when Monica, assuming Hortense to be a Jehovah’s Witness, almost shuts the door in her face), it’s that, owing to its downplaying of the issue of race, the film doesn’t really explore how Hortense processes the monumental upending of her own identity, how she reacts to the newly complicated nature of her own Blackness in relation to her existing family and community.

Perhaps this lack is consistent with the measured personality of a character developed in great detail by Leigh and Jean-Baptiste. Perhaps Hortense will come to the matter in time. And perhaps my feelings about this aspect of the film are indivisible from my wider despair at the paucity of cinema by and about, and offering complex, nuanced portraits of, Black British people. By 1996, the year of Secrets & Lies’ release, only one Black British filmmaker, Horace Ové, had made more than one film that received theatrical distribution in the United Kingdom. The state of the landscape in the nineties was effectively summarized by the title of Alexander’s perceptive 2000 essay “Black British Cinema in the ’90s: Going Going Gone.”