Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996) (Patreon)

Yes, I am only just now catching up with Mike Leigh's Palme d'Or winner, his biggest critical and commercial success Stateside so far. When it came out, I was generally disinclined toward seeing what I perceived to be "Oscar movies," and although I'd seen three of Leigh's films by this point, something about this film just put me off. Maybe its Woody Allenesque title? Anyway, I had no good reason not to stick with the guy who made High Hopes and Naked. I have no excuse.

This is a very interesting film to look back upon, because as I mentioned briefly on Twitter (before deciding the matter was too thorny to broach in 280 characters), Secrets & Lies quite inadvertently speaks to the current abortion debate in the U.S. As detailed in Peter Mullan's The Magdalena Sisters, British and Irish women who became pregnant out of wedlock were essentially sent away to Catholic birthing houses, and abortion was not legal in the U.K. until 1967. Leigh of course addressed this matter himself in Vera Drake, a film based in part on his own mother.

In Secrets & Lies, Leigh wisely leaves a number of things unsaid. Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a woman who seems to feel that life has passed her by, and as the film plays out, we realize she is arrested in a traumatized state. She was forced to become a mother too young, and when she gave birth to her (known) daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), she was "only a child herself." As such, she relied on her responsible younger brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) to help raise her baby girl. But only Cynthia and Maurice know that she had two babies before Roxanne. And it gradually becomes apparent that one of those children, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), was the result of Cynthia having been sexually assaulted at age 15.

In 1996 -- or 2015 for that matter -- there were certain givens within the abortion debate. One of those givens, consistently supported by pro-life Republicans like Reagan, both Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain, and virtually the entire GOP, was that if abortion were banned, exceptions would have to be made in the cases of rape and incest. A woman might choose to carry a pregnancy to term under those circumstances, but no woman should ever be forced to. But now, an emboldened right-to-life movement has joined forces with patriarchal extremists and lunatics fomenting fears of a "Great Replacement," and with a shocking rapidity it has become American right-wing orthodoxy that fetuses must always be protected, even if it spells death or horrific trauma for the mother. 

None of this, of course, pertains to Secrets & Lies per se. But within the current crisis of right-wing extremism, it can be misread as a film that offers an object lesson on why women who become pregnant from sexual assault should not terminate those pregnancies. Hortense was adopted by a loving, stable family, and she grew up to become more successful and self-actualized than her working-class birth mother. As Cynthia says to Hortense after learning about her life, "I did you a good turn" by giving her up for adoption. 

Even though Secrets & Lies has a hopeful conclusion, it's a film that demonstrates not only the complexity of the issue of unwanted / forced motherhood, but the way that such a shattering loss of autonomy can leave permanent psychological scars. At first I was bothered by Cynthia's radical rejection of Hortense, followed by her ardent embrasure of her "new" daughter. It felt forced somehow. But I realized that it is forced, in the sense that Cynthia is desperate to transform one of the worst experiences of her life into an unexpected positive. The fact that Cynthia reveals Hortense's identity to her family, without gaining Hortense's permission, indicates how fragile and misguided Cynthia is, how her decisions mostly come from a place of damage. Secrets & Lies does propose that, with honesty and empathy, people and families can heal. But it also suggests that if Cynthia had had more bodily autonomy, her entire life might have followed a very different trajectory. Instead, she was compelled to compound violation with shame-inducing loss and regret. I fear that this could be the fate of millions of American women in the coming years, although I pray that's not the case.