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

74/100

Third viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. (My contemporaneous review is heavy on disappointment that was very much relative to how much I'd loved Leigh's three previous features.) Remembered its emotional intensity but had forgotten the specific way that it arrives there, viz. spending over an hour establishing Cynthia as a total wreck in general (while simultaneously/alternately watching Hortense learn of her existence), so that by the time that first phone call happens we're practically in full-on horror territory, thinking "That poor woman cannot possibly handle this" even before she's broadsided by the racial aspect*. Hard to imagine an American version of this story touching on said aspect so lightly and delicately, and Leigh mostly makes it work; my only truly significant reservation—though it's a big one—involves Hortense's passivity when she returns from the bathroom to discover that Cynthia blurted out the truth in her absence. Ambushing her like that, after she agreed to lie to the family (my favorite subtle acting moment: Jean-Baptiste's barely visible wince when Cynthia proudly announces that Hortense went to college, thereby undermining their cover story), is just plain unconscionable, and at least a momentary burst of anger or resentment in response would have been both more believable and less discomfiting. Instead, Hortense sits through the end of the film in nearly complete silence, as the focus shifts to Cynthia's other daughter and her anger about having been kept in the dark her whole life. Throw in the strong implication that Hortense's father raped Cynthia and it gets a little dicey. 

Still, what a goddamn wringer. Like Jane Horrocks and David Thewlis before her, Blethyn came out of nowhere to create an indelibly hyperbolic character who's utterly rooted in behavioral specificity—it's an astonishingly raw performance, sustaining a pleading, needy register for well over two hours with zero concern for the possibility that we'll be driven mad, and Blethyn's bad luck that it happened to be in a film released the same year as Breaking the Waves, for which Emily Watson won Best Actress in the Skandies not only for 1996 but for the entire freakin' decade (male actors included; Thewlis came in 2nd). The temptation to compete with her histrionics must have been fierce, and Jean-Baptiste correctly, stubbornly resists, letting the sobs and knee-jerk terms of endearment wash over her without ever seeming callous. And this is one of those Leigh films in which every stray person who wanders into the frame for a single scene could absolutely anchor an entire film of his/her own—most obviously Ron Cook as the former owner of Maurice's photography studio (a magnificently shabby turn that couldn't be further removed from Topsy-Turvy's ultra-smooth Richard D'Oyly Carte), but also Hortense's best friend, who genuinely seems to have known her for years, and even the random woman with the scar, whose barely-controlled fury is so galvanizing that I failed to vote for her appearance in Best Scene only because I didn't create that category until 1997. Monica's a bit one-dimensionally odious at first, but that's very much strategic. Watching an ostensibly high-concept scenario like this one imagined with such depth and care makes me even more contemptuous of mediocrities like Parallel Mothers and Like Father, Like Son, which treat their loglines like a destination rather than a launchpad. 

People who've just met don't sit on the same side of a restaurant booth unless there's a motion-picture camera on the opposite side, though. 

* Cynthia looking right past Hortense at the tube station gets me weepy for a personal reason: I'd had a somewhat similar experience two years previously. Spent late '93 and early '94 flirting heavily with someone online, and only when we met in person, after several months of emails and [creaking joints] IRC chats, did I realize that I'd just unconsciously assumed her to be white. Which she is not (or not entirely, rather—her dad is). We were together four years and I think two of them elapsed before I felt secure enough to tell her that I'd been caught off guard. Her reply: "I could see that on your face. You recovered super fast, it was fine. I assumed you were white. I was just right."