Secrets & Lies (1996)

directed by Mike Leigh

Emma Ben Ayoun

The first time I watched Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies was December of 2020. I was back at my parents’ house for the holidays, quarantined in their basement for two full weeks, trying to figure out how to face or explain the fact that my marriage had ended, abruptly and without explanation, a few months before. I was alone in these two very new ways, more alone than I’d been in years, and it was a very particular kind of alone, womblike: dimly lit, half-hearing the music and conversations and arguments in the house above. I was soothed, nervous, restless, happy to spend my days in silence. I knew I’d have to account for myself, once I made my way up the stairs, but I longed to be held.

Watching Secrets & Lies occupied the better part of a dark-gray morning, and then, without giving it much thought, I watched it again, immediately, and then once more. This certainly wasn’t a cinematic world I wanted to live in forever. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave it, either. And my desire to write about it has followed the same trajectory. I can’t shake Secrets & Lies, and I’m desperate to write about it, but to write about it would mean to try to write about my own family, to try to give some kind of form to the shapeless, heavy, immaterial mass that is a family.

Secrets & Lies is about Hortense, a Black British woman, and her search for her white birth mother Cynthia, and it’s about the strained and complicated relationships between that birth mother, her other daughter Roxanne, her brother Maurice, his wife Monica, about class resentments and grudges and grief and the ebb and flow of care. It bears little resemblance to my own experience, technically. But I see (and am hardly alone in seeing) my own aunts and uncles, the half-drawn living rooms of my childhood, my own father and brother and mother in every frame. And the thought of putting words to paper that my family might read one day, the thought of writing my version of their inner worlds, as if I had access to some distance from which I might see them better than they see themselves, when in fact I know only that I am far too close to know almost anything about them at all—it’s impossible, and makes me feel ashamed, in a childish way, like I’ve overstepped. 

So I want to start from there: from what to do when faced with the impossible task of representing a family, which is always an imaginary, unsatisfying thing. It makes sense to me that Maurice is a portrait photographer, that he wants to see people reenact themselves, make their relationships to each other briefly visible; that Hortense is an optometrist, inspecting the gazes of others all day; and even that Maurice’s infertile wife, Monica, puts so much anxious energy into the decoration of their house, matching curtains to wallpaper in each ornately empty room. It’s hard to let go of the hope that if we stage it all just right, a new self, a new family, will emerge into visibility. In the film’s sweet and painful climactic sequence, Maurice and Monica’s birthday barbeque for Roxanne where all is finally revealed, the characters bumble around the foyer and the living room in search of the right place to stand, to sit, to put their stuff down. Such a place never quite comes.

First, the facts. I come from a very big family. My mother is the fifth of seven children, raised in the Bronx, and my father is the seventh of nine children, born in Algeria, raised in France, where most of them (and their children, and their children’s children) still live. Even our more intimate family gatherings, growing up, were easily twenty people deep and abundantly loud. My whole life, cousins have come to live with us, to stay with us. It is hard for me to imagine small families, or quiet ones.

Nearly every Sunday, my father spends a part of the day on long long-distance calls back home; he is 65 now, and there are fewer people to call with each passing year. My mother has spent much of the last year helping to care for her mother, my only living grandparent. The work of keeping the family going, keeping it from receding into memory or drifting beyond repair, is not lost on me. (And not everyone in Secrets & Lies is concerned with staging and appearances. I think of Cynthia working in a factory, Roxanne sweeping the debris from the streets, her boyfriend Paul a scaffolder. There is a more unglamorous side of things: building, maintenance, repetition.)

And family is not just an architecture. It is also a temporal structure: some vague mostly-dead genealogy and some shared understanding of conjoined futures. And this is where secrets and lies come into play too, because secrets are always sort of about the past (about something that has been concealed), and lies are always sort of about the future (the lie contorts the present, but it always hints at its own potential unveiling). When Cynthia and Hortense finally meet, finally confirm that Cynthia did in fact give birth to Hortense and give her up for adoption, the two women sit side by side at a cafe, looking out together at nothing in particular. A closeness that is as much proximity as it is intimacy, a shared view that isn’t, can’t be, of each other.

Of course, a family is also a set of memories, my own and not my own. My father’s sisters harmonizing around the dining room table; my mother’s rosaries and autograph cards in her childhood bedroom, a plastic compact, an orange lipstick in the top drawer; my cousins roasting the meshoui, the smell of lamb and smoke in my uncle’s garden full of olives and lavender; my grandmother’s stories about her childhood in Upper East Side tenements. Faces of the dead smoothed into golden frames on the credenza. All of these sometimes easier to summon than the daily routines of my own childhood, than the past five years of my life far from home; none of these remotely like the lives of any of the characters in this film and yet exactly the same: full of loneliness and love, hysteria and gentleness, excess and repression. Bonds weakening and then flourishing again. People dreaded, people eagerly awaited at the door.

Secrets & Lies begins with a long pan across a graveyard. And then a family—Hortense’s adoptive family, we will learn—singing, while Hortense stands with her mouth set, crying, her mother being lowered into the earth. Soon we will meet her second mother, who was also her first mother, and who was also never her mother: the devastating, fragile Cynthia.

A graveyard is maybe the only place where families can remain together forever. A graveyard collects all kinds of endings, disparate as they may be in time and space, lines them up in the hard ground outside of time. And in beginning with an ending I think Mike Leigh reminds us that a family is always twisted in this way, always behind us and in front of us—something to escape and something to make. The very next shot is of Maurice arranging a bride’s dress just so for her wedding portrait: another construction of a beginning, the first day of a new family, that is also the production of a past, already imagining the future’s tender backwards glance.

The bride’s expression—a strained and nervous smile, at the cusp of tears—moves me, in this scene, moved me especially as I watched that first time two years ago, all my own beginnings and endings caving in on me. And then we cut to Monica, hammering dutifully away at some kind of craft project in the living room. The graveyard, the photograph, the house: all of the places our parents reside, all of the things left behind and returned to, frozen places, prone to gathering dust.

It’s impossible, watching the film for what must now be the tenth time, to remember what these first scenes were like before I knew who these characters were, how they related to each other. And it is impossible to imagine in earnest, even if I know it to be true, that my grandmother once looked young to my mother, that my parents had a life together for years before me.

I am still learning all my family’s secrets—more often than not, by accident, through a parent’s slip of the tongue that casts some family story, some character, in an entirely new light—but as I get older I have found these secrets less frustrating than I once did, not because I am less curious, but because I have become more patient. Or maybe not more patient, but more capable of understanding that in my house there are four different families—my father’s, my mother’s, my brother’s, my own—overlapping but distinct, each of us the onlooker in our own story, the differentiated one, the guardian of some secret unshareable self.

In the George Saunders story “Winky,” a miserable man named Neil Yaniky goes to a self-help seminar to drum up the courage to tell his tragic, oblivious sister Winky that she needs to move out. She’s holding him back, he thinks, she’s making it impossible for him to invite women over, she’s a financial burden, she’s graceless and ugly and off-putting and—worse—she’s cheerful, content, full of gratitude for him, for life. But when he gets home from the seminar, he sees her waiting excitedly at the door and he knows he can’t do it. He doesn’t. Neil, it’s clear, has done the right thing—even though his sister sounds awful, even if Neil is right to think that she makes his life harder, even if it’s cruel and unfair of him to blame her for everything. And what would Neil Yaniky be, ultimately, without a sister to hide his feelings from, a sister to blame for the cascading small disappointments of his life? Our families are the cozy store-rooms for our resentments as much as anything else.

In Secrets & Lies, Roxanne’s bratty yelling at her mother Cynthia, her endless exasperation, is a flimsy, moving cover for her deep need. When Cynthia goes out one evening to meet Hortense, without saying why, Roxanne can hardly bear it. Without a mother to leave, without the reliable confinements of the family home, where can she go? Perhaps this is all obvious, but I don’t actually think it is. The question—where is my mother?—launches Hortense into the narrative, but it’s telling that Leigh doesn’t turn his film into some kind of complicated hunt, doesn’t make mother and daughter’s encounter the film’s climax. It’s because the question is an impossible one. My mother is before me, my mother is unknowable before me, my mother is at the start of me and I am at the start of her, too, the thing that makes her a mother. A mother always has secrets.

So perhaps a family is defined in part by its frustrations, by its dysfunction, by its inescapability. This isn’t to say I don’t understand estrangement, loss. But rather that I think there is something about the familial in all its forms that by its very nature can’t be undone, even if that thing is a hole, a void. Ties are ties, I think, whether kept or cut. I don’t mean this in biological terms, really, though Secrets & Lies is certainly concerned with the so-called biological and its own strangeness. I mean instead that when we talk about family I think we talk about the ways we are all, in one way or another, thrust into connections with other people that feel arbitrary, because they are, and meaningful, because they are—because they are where meaning comes from. I know that it will be impossible to convey the truth of my life now to the child I hope to have one day, not out of malice or concealment, but because that is simply how it must be. I know too that to understand my parents as mysteries is to see them more clearly than I once did.

What is a family but a shape, a frame, a room? Gaston Bachelard writes that when we dream in the cellar, we are “in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.” I am preparing for another return home, a happier one this time, but I write this at least in part for the me I was two years ago: sleepy and heartbroken, half in the ground, the weight of my family bearing down on me, keeping me afloat.

Emma Ben Ayoun is a writer, editor, and teacher of film and media theory in Los Angeles.