#1070: LEIGH, Mike: Secrets & Lies [1996]

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LEIGH, Mike (United Kingdom)
Secrets & Lies [1996]
Spine #1070
Blu-ray

Writer-director Mike Leigh reached new levels of expressive power and intricacy in his ongoing contemplation of unembellished humanity with this resonant exploration of the deceptions, small and large, that shape our relationships to those we love. When Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptistery), a Black optometrist who was adopted as a child, begins the search for her birth other, she doesn’t expect that it will lead her to Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award), a desperately lonely white factory worker whose tentative embrace of her long-lost daughter spends shock waves through the rest of her already fragile family. Born from a painstaking process of rehearsal and improvisation with a powerhouse ensemble cast, Secrets & Lies is a Palme d’Or-winning tour de force of sustained tension and catharsis that lays bare the emotional fault lines running beneath the surface of everyday lives.

142 minutes
Color
2.0 Surround
in English and Greek
1:85:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2021
Director/Writer


Mike Leigh was 53 when he wrote and directed Secrets & Lies.

Other Leigh films in the Collection:

#890: Meantime (1984)
#659: Life Is Sweet (1990)
#307: Naked (1993)
#558: Topsy-Turvy (1999)

The Film

A

Film Rating (0-60):

60

The Extras

 The Booklet

Twelve-page wraparound featuring an essay by film programmer and critic Ashley Clark.

Commentary

None.

Conversation 1

Between Leigh and composer Gary Yershon.

Conversation 2

Between actor Jean-Baptiste and film critic Corrina Antrobus.

Audio interview

With Leigh, conducted by film critic Michel Ciment in 1996.

Trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

39

60 + 39 =

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