FAMILY VALUES

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two women, who have just met, sit side by side in a drab London cafe near a tube station. The younger woman, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), has told the older, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), that she is her daughter, given up for adoption 28 years ago. Cynthia curdles in disbelief, for she is white, Hortense black. "I don't mean nothin' by it, darlin'," Cynthia protests in her tiny voice, "but I ain't never been with a black man in my life." She stares into the void, and then a chill comes over her stricken face--you can almost see the room temperature drop--as the truth collapses on her. She dissolves in tears as her daughter sits numbly beside her. Welcome to the family, Hortense.

The scene, from the film Secrets & Lies, is a vintage Mike Leigh moment--a whirl of comedy and soap opera, of bruising tenderness and bravura acting, with the immediacy of real life heightened into the craft of movie art. As Blethyn lets the waterworks flow, Leigh's camera holds on her and Jean-Baptiste for nearly eight purging minutes. Blethyn's heroic work won her the Best Actress prize this year at the Cannes Film Festival. And Secrets & Lies was named Best Film at Cannes. This week it opens the New York Film Festival and will have its premiere in other major cities over the next six weeks.

Leigh has been "devising" films, as he puts it, for 25 years, since the aptly titled Bleak Moments. Unable to secure studio financing, he made films for the BBC and Channel 4, where he carved out his own dramatic genre: working-class Brits scraping each other's skin with their verbal aggressions. Since the late '80s he has worked on the big screen. Some of his films (High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked) have earned him critics' awards and a small, passionate U.S. following. He has received museum retrospectives and is the subject of Michael Coveney's comprehensive, reverent biography The World According to Mike Leigh (HarperCollins). But Secrets & Lies could be his first movie to break through to a wide audience. It is easy to imagine dropping into a mall this fall and hearing America sob along with Cynthia.

What viewers will discover is a long (2 hrs. 16 min.), absorbing and ultimately sunny comedy-drama that treats all its characters scrupulously and generously. Cynthia, a factory worker, has another daughter, balky Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), "with a face like a slapped arse," and a younger brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), whom she raised but to whom she has not spoken in two years. "Cynthia's really very capable," notes Blethyn, "although not the brightest." So when Hortense shows up, it is a shock and an opportunity. Secrets will be revealed, and lies made truth, at Roxanne's 21st-birthday party, held by Maurice and his stressful wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). Catharsis is achieved a mite speedily, but the family has earned so much pity and goodwill, we want them all just to have a big hug.

One reason the cafe scene is so poignant is that Blethyn did not know before she played it that the actress cast as Cynthia's daughter would be black. "I had seen Marianne Jean-Baptiste's name on the cast list," says Blethyn, a top stage and TV actress who played Brad Pitt's mother in A River Runs Through It, "but I'd never met her. I went to the station that day, saw Marianne and knew she was not the right one. When she said, 'Are you Cynthia?' I really thought she was on the crew! So when Cynthia says there has been some mistake, that was my honest reaction. It wasn't acting."

That might seem like a naughty prank, but for the director it is part of the method that makes his films unique and, when they work as well as Secrets & Lies does, uniquely potent. "I create these films in a very intuitive, subjective, instinctive and emotional way," says Leigh, 53. "It's very much about going out and making up a film." The tactic is improvisation, a months-long process during which Leigh's actors help create the lives of their characters.

"Instead of writing a script and casting it in the usual way," Leigh says, "I gather a group of actors together, and they work for a long period before the shoot--five months in the case of Secrets & Lies. I've got all kinds of notions on the go but haven't committed myself to anything. The job is to create the palette for the film, create the characters, create the relationships, the back story, the whole world of the characters. Then I can go on location with the cast and crew and, in a sophisticated sort of way, make up the film as we go along--working from improvisations through to the very precise, structured, distilled material that is on the screen."

The material is indeed distilled. It doesn't meander, waiting for behavioral inspiration to strike. To be sure, there are wildly eccentric turns in a Leigh film, especially the early TV work; with all the belching and farting, you often feel you've been locked in the Museum of Rude Mannerisms. When Blethyn, as a grasping, pathetic maiden sister in the 1980 Grown-Ups, comes out of a bathroom after her mad scene, snot drips instructively from her nose as a residue of her hysteria.

But this is a case of an actor--through her gaudy and acute performance--serving the work, not the other way around. As Leigh actors should, for they are being true to characters they in part created. It is a symbiosis between Leigh and his actors, who have included some of Britain's finest and most daring: Timothy Spall, David Thewlis, Leslie Manville, Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Su Elliott, Stephen Rea, Jim Broadbent, Jane Horrocks and pre-eminently Alison Steadman, who has played all manner of agreeable or manic women in five Leigh pictures and who married the director in 1973. (The couple, recently separated, have two sons.)

Leigh's films fall roughly into two attitudinal groups. The early TV pieces (eight of them are available on video from Water Bearer Films) are harsher in tone, so scabrous that some critics have been able to embrace them only as ghastly farces. This is a 200-proof, antiromantic vision of Britain. The scepter'd isle has devolved into a nation of pasty, mottled, overweight slugs who stew in boredom, then explode into violence: a fight (Nuts in May), a heart attack (Abigail's Party), a nervous breakdown (Grown-Ups), an unmasked double adultery (Home Sweet Home).

This is naturalism bent into ferocious misanthropy. The characters practice traditional English courtesy as if it is a vaguely remembered religious rite observed in the letter but not the spirit. And often they don't bother. Leigh's first TV film, the 1973 Hard Labour, has barely a kind word in its 73 minutes; even the nun to whom the saintly lead character offers charity is snarky and ungrateful.

Each face carries a grudge. The men mutter and growl and get fall-down drunk. The women wheedle and whine. Or they knit furiously, like Lindsay Duncan in Grown-Ups, as if rehearsing to put her unloving husband's eyes out. Or they throw insults like darts. "Drop dead!" shouts the pretentious Beverly (Steadman) at her husband in Abigail's Party (1977); two minutes later, he does. The hate-filled wife in Home Sweet Home is an adulterer, but infidelity with her husband's best friend gives the woman no more pleasure than anything else in her sorry life. There is a majestic contempt on display here--loathing raised to an art form.

And that is just the working class, to whom Leigh, a Jewish doctor's son who grew up in the working-class Midlands city of Salford, feels some kinship. His films are mostly unforgiving to the upper-middle class and those who would join it. Nuts in May (1975) is a drolly unfair comedy about two educated twits on a camping holiday, seeking to be at one with nature and above base humanity. Who's Who (1978) turns a stockbroker into a toady of Dickensian breadth.

With Four Days in July (1985), the tone mellowed; Leigh was kind to both the Catholics and the Protestants of Belfast--though the Republicans had the funnier lines. High Hopes saves its venom for the hilariously rendered posh types and poseurs; toward its central couple of fuzzy Marxists, the film dares to be sweetly sentimental. In Life Is Sweet and especially Secrets & Lies, the working-class families are observed, warts and all, with an insider's love and forgiveness. "One way or another, all my films are about roots and families," says Leigh. "One of my cousins saw Secrets & Lies and said, 'Oh, there we are all again.'"

Leigh denies an explicit strain of autobiography in Secrets & Lies. He does say, "There are people close to me, whom I can't talk about, who have had adoption-related experiences. I also had a notion to do something with a generation of black people who are growing up and moving on. And we had some research about black babies born to white women in the '50s and '60s. But did I know the story? No. Those are the sorts of things one discovers by making the film."

Secrets & Lies is rich in humor, pained or frolicking. Blethyn's Cynthia is an especially voluptuous creation, with her carelessly dyed hair and mincing steps, her metallic, baby-doll voice that calls everyone darlin' or sweetie, her habit of puddling into tears as her life spins out of control.

Cynthia's brother Maurice is a portrait photographer, and in some of Secrets & Lies' most charming vignettes we see people posing before his camera. Among the clients are actors from Leigh's earlier films, and one likes to think he has given reprieve to the mean times they endured: the cleaning woman in Hard Labour (Liz Smith), now a swank matron; the adulterer in Home Sweet Home (Elliott) giggling with two girlfriends; the conniving hostess of Abigail's Party (Steadman) primping her pet dog for a glamour shot. The wounded creatures of Leigh's angrier films are reconciled into one big, happy family. Secrets & Lies shows Mike in all his moods: true Leigh, mad Leigh, deep Leigh.

--With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York