Secrets & Lies, UK 1996, dir. Mike Leigh.
I watched the DVD from the Criterion Collection, which includes interviews with director Leigh and actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hortense).
NOTE: There's a spoiler about the emotional tone at the end of the movie.
It's the very last sentence--after the video--I left space so you can easily skip it.
BELOW: Hortense, left, is a newly orphaned adoptee, about 26 years old, searching for her birth mother.
Lesley Manville, right, is astonishing as a social worker whose professional kindness is sincere, yet chilling. You sense she's gone through this with adoptees a million times, and half-a-million times seen it go wrong.
This doesn't go wrong, but there is a surprise.
Hortense: "There's a mistake, it says she's white."
Social Worker: "Well, your mother could be white, couldn't she?"
Just this month, my state changed the law allowing access to birth records:
"As of July 1, 2024, Minnesota law changed to allow access to original birth records by adoptees."
To request this, you fill out a PDF and submit it online.
In the movie, Hortense mails her request to discover her birth mother ––she drops it in a red
pillar post box––and she goes in person to the public-records office to consult
massive volumes of birth and death dates.
The technology from 1995/96 is outdated, but this movie about a Black woman discovering that her biological mother is white has turned out to be prescient because of a hard-to-predict twist in the years since:
the rise of home DNA test kits.
With these kits, lots of
people who were only looking for info about where in the world they're from have been finding out that their relatives aren't who they'd thought they were.
Are they still who they thought they were, themselves?
BBC article: These people took DNA tests. The results changed their lives, 2023.
______________
How does new knowledge of your ancestry change how you see yourself?
An acquaintance of mine, Lars, now in his sixties, grew up in a Lutheran family of Scandinavian ancestry. He never knew who his grandfather was.
His grandmother had been a teenage mother, and her parents had raised her baby as their own. Lars's dad grew up thinking his mother was his sister, until someone spilled the beans.
Everyone thought the grandmother was hiding something. Getting hold of her high-school diary after her death, however, Lars thinks it's more likely that she didn't know who the father was. She'd coded it, but it's clear that she'd slept around with different boys in high school.
A couple years ago, Lars got an email from a stranger:
"We're cousins".
The stranger was following up their own DNA testing. It turned out,
Lars's grandfather was one of his grandmother's high school classmates--a Jewish classmate. Lars immediately started investigating that history and claiming Jewish identity.
However, it's only a piece of information that changed---Lars is no more Jewish socially or religiously than he was for sixty+ years. Of course, there is no genetic marker for "Jewish".
Or for race, either, because "race is real, but it's not genetic." And, "Geographic ancestry is not the same thing as race." --sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real
Unlike Lars, Hortense does enter into a different social reality as she begins a relationship with her new family members--"Welcome to the family", they say to her-- yet we get no inkling
of what Hortense thinks or feels about her biological family being white.
This
seems unlikely, not because Hortense is shown to be political or
personally unsure of herself--in fact, she is pretty solid--but because
she lives (we live) in a society dominated by race.
Example:
the actor who played Hortense, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, found she
wasn't getting any roles afterward, despite the success of the movie and
being nominated herself for an Academy Award.
Mike Leigh works
closely with his actors for months before writing the final script and
together they create a complete backstory for their person. But there's
this peculiar gap in Hortense's.
_________________________
Hortense comes from the middle class and is a successful optometrist. Her birth mother, Cynthia, is not only a different race, she's a different class. She scrapes by working in a box-making factory and living where she grew up--in a crumbling, squashed East End terraced house, with an outdoor toilet.
[Mike Leigh said in the Criterion interview that they filmed in a real East End house, which had just been sold to a gentrifier. The rooms were so small, he said, it was hard to fit the camera in.]
Secrets & Lies is an excellent movie--Mike Leigh's best, many say. Marz is a big believer in the crowd-smarts of Rotten Tomatoes, and this movie gets 96% thumbs-up.
I liked it a lot, and I recommend it, 4.5 out of 5 stars.
I took a half-star off because it's almost unbearable to watch Cynthia weeping hysterically, as she often does, and pleading for pity in a high-pitched whine.
It's not that she's not believable. Unfortunately, she
totally is.
Cynthia is the human equivalent of her dead father's upstairs
bedroom, cluttered with the detritus of a small life, so water-damaged in the ceiling, it's soggy.
Please stop crying.
If I were the director I'd have gone a little lighter because Cynthia's pain was so obnoxious, I lost sympathy for her.
Maybe Leigh wanted to get that across--that pain can make us into sniveling spongy slobs, and that other people's pain may revolt us...
Still, I'd give us a break.
Secrets & Lies is more hopeful than most of Leigh's movies though (maybe that's why it's a favorite). They are sometimes unremittingly bleak stories about ordinary people struggling with bad luck and social ills.
It's a relief that Hortense is a nice and giving person, but that's at least partly because she had a happy childhood. No special credit to her.
The character who brings the humanity into the bleakness, despite a wretched family, is Cynthia's brother Maurice (Timothy Spall).
He is recognizable--the person in the dysfunctional family who tries to take care of everyone, and fails, because it is impossible.
Maurice runs his own successful photography studio; successful, because he SEES people. My favorite scene--a gem in the middle of the film--is a wonderful sequence showing people having their photos taken by him.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=13f2Hzo_qyk&ab_channel=JoeS
SPOILER below
So here's a song to hum for an INTERMISSION
___________________
Maurice is lovely--one character says, "I wish I had a father like you"–– and it's an enormous relief that his goodness is rewarded in the end, at least for a moment.
Sometimes things aren't so bad.
At least for a moment.
I did like that film, though agree totally about the winging in excess. Thannk you for the photo --taking- clip , that is so excellent i could watch that all day. I am a fan of all of the DNA options- we did 23&me when it first came out - it was quite specific and continued to be organic , letting us know what new drugs we might react to negatively. that sort of thing as discoveries unfolded. But then it became commercial , the women sold it to some business shysters.
ReplyDeleteThere were no surprises. Fun, interesting post, sending me into DNA land and that time my brother nearly dated our first cousin , who lived in the town over from ours, because - secrets kept , lives wrecked in the wake of a betrayal by my Uncle.
Thanks, Anon, for weighing in---the DNA stuff fascinates me--my father had it done the year before he died--I'm so glad he did--showed what he'd always said was true: that we were related to everyone because everyone came through Sicily (where his parents came from)---
Deleteeveryone from the Vikings to the Arabs through North Africa, Central Asia through the Silk Road, and the Jewish diaspora.
He was only disappointed there were no Neaderthals.