![]() As you get to know her, you simply forget that she’s black because you get to know her and it ceases to be an issue. The audience would inevitably begin by meeting Hortense and immediately classifying her as a black person - this is what racism is about. However subtly, it continues to be an issue. I think it remains very important - and here we are talking about what the film is saying. But what Leigh chooses to emphasize is Cynthia’s working class struggles over Hortense’s skin color, which is immediately noticeable. Her birth mother, Cynthia, is a single, white, working-class woman, who lives in a tumbledown apartment with her rude daughter, Roxanne. Hortense is an educated black woman, living an elegant life in a fancy neighborhood in London. The film is significant for what it avoids, as well as for what it didn’t feel necessary to state - that blackness refers to a clearly defined kind of identity. Instead, the movie focuses on the way these human beings relate to each other in a broader sense. Of course, there’s much drama to be extracted from this revelation, and the result is a pleasantly surprising film that avoids low-hanging racial themes that other films on similar topics would likely pounce on. “Secrets & Lies” stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Hortense, a young black professional who, following the death of her adoptive parents, decides to track down her biological mother, whom she later discovers is a white woman - and the matriarch of a family in total chaos. ![]() Over the course of his five-decade career, however, he’s never done this better than is 1996 masterpiece “ Secrets & Lies.” Given its plot, most would assume that it revolves around race relations, but it actually ignores race almost entirely, and, as a result, delivers a more complex assessment of it. And his infatuation with class and tense family dynamics is palpable in every one of his films. His keen awareness of character, setting and tempo result in remarkable sequences that pull from the drift of everyday life. Mike Leigh’s unflinching depictions of real life are what make his films so complex and captivating. Stream of the Day: The Gaspar Noé Films That Shocked, Disgusted, and Dazzled Cannes ![]() Stream of the Day: Edward Yang's 'Yi Yi' Reflects the Richness of Our Own Lives To fill the void left by the absence of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, for the next two weeks, this column will be dedicated to films that premiered at the festival over the course of seven decades. With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform. ![]()
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