Cynthia fearfully agrees to meet with her. This secret has been guarded not only by Cynthia but by her younger brother, Maurice ( Timothy Spall), and his wife, Monica ( Phyllis Logan).Ĭynthia breaks into tears and hangs up on Hortense. After the death of her mother, she decides to seek her birth mother, and the long-held secret of Cynthia's first child is threatened. Hortense ( Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a black woman, now in her late 20s, an optometrist. This happens when she receives a phone call from Hortense Cumberbatch, who Cynthia bore out of wedlock at 16 and gave up for adoption without ever seeing her. Cynthia seems an anthology of raw sadness and worry, but she will be transformed when her worst nightmare comes true. That's true of Brenda Blethyn's performance in "Secrets & Lies" as Cynthia Purley, a factory worker who rattles discontentedly around the little rowhouse she was born in and regards Roxanne, her 20-year-old daughter, with despair. Characters who seem over the top in one scene have a way of rounding out later in a film. In the 17 years between features, he perfected what he instinctively began with: tragicomic portraits of discontented people in trying circumstances, and an embarrassment in social situations that borders on pathology.Īlthough he makes some characters into caricatures, there is a compassion in his work that acts like a safety net. This turned out to be the film's first review Leigh had been ignored at home in England. When I saw "Bleak Moments," I knew I was watching a masterpiece by a great director and wrote a long review for the Sun-Times.
In between, he worked constantly for television and the theater but couldn't get a film financed because the backers wanted to see a script, and of course he didn't have one. He made his second, " High Hopes," in 1988.
Leigh, born 1943, made his first feature, " Bleak Moments," in 1971.
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