The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mike Leigh · a film · 1996 · written and directed by Mike Leigh, the script devised with the cast through long improvised preparation · in English
Mode
Devised realist family drama; comedy of manners and adoption melodrama played in long takes
Mythos
The lost child restored and recognised at a feast; the maker of images who cannot see his own house
Phase
From a graveside to a back garden: a search, a meeting in a café, and a birthday barbecue at which the secrets come out
Presentation
Feature film in English; an ensemble of three households; long static takes at the centre, short posed studio scenes through the whole
Register
Level comedy and irritation, rising three times to tears; a plain camera and devised performance
Scale
Three households, two generations, one table
Governing Proposition
A Black woman in London, burying the mother who adopted her, finds that her birth mother is a white woman who works in a box factory, and the two meet; at a birthday table the secret comes out and others follow it. The wager of the film is that the lies a family tells to spare its members have become their injury, that truth between people arrives slowly and in shared time, and that only the truth told in company gives kinship a floor.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens at a graveside. Hortense Cumberbatch, a Black optometrist in London, buries the woman who adopted her, and the death frees her to search. At the records office a social worker gives her the file, and gives the search its cost before it begins. The mother named there is Cynthia Purley, a white woman who works in a cardboard box factory and lives in a terraced house with her other daughter, Roxanne, a street sweeper. Across the city Cynthia’s younger brother Maurice, a portrait and wedding photographer, lives with his wife Monica in a new suburban house, and the brother and sister have drifted. Three households stand apart, and the film will bring them to one table.
Secrets & Lies was written and directed by Mike Leigh, the script devised with the cast through his method of long improvised preparation, and produced by Simon Channing Williams for Thin Man Films with CiBy 2000 and Channel Four Films; Dick Pope photographed it, Jon Gregory edited it and Andrew Dickson wrote the music, each a regular collaborator of Leigh’s in these years. It was released in 1996, a British and French production in English. At Cannes that year it won the Palme d’Or, and Brenda Blethyn the festival’s prize for best actress; it took five Academy Award nominations, none won, and the BAFTA for best British film. The film is judged here as released, in the one version it has.
The inheritance is double. One line is British social realism, from the kitchen-sink films to Ken Loach and Leigh’s own High Hopes, Life Is Sweet and Naked; the other is the adoption melodrama, the woman’s picture of the lost child found. The turn is to play the melodrama inside the realist method, so that its big scenes arrive as embarrassment and duration rather than as climax, and to cast the returning child as a Black professional and the mother as white and working poor, declining race as the problem the plot expects. The stake was small. Naked had won Leigh the director’s prize at Cannes three years before, and this film returns to a warmer register on ground its maker had already cleared.
Movement II
Through the whole film runs a series of short scenes in Maurice’s studio: client after client posed into a smile and photographed, each scene brief, cut against the next. The photographer arranges the faces of strangers for the camera while his own family cannot smile. That is the film’s law at rest: the face a person shows is arranged for others, and the truth beneath it costs to bring out. The sittings are comedy, and they are also the counterform to everything the film will hold without a cut. Maurice is the maker of images who cannot see his own house, keeper of the family’s false face, and the film sets its two kinds of image against each other, the posed and the endured.
His own house is Monica’s: a spotless new-build, its fussiness and its coolness to Cynthia read at first as house-pride and read again, once her childlessness is known, as a wound kept out of sight. In Cynthia’s terraced house Roxanne meets her mother’s endearments with sullen silence and quarrels with her boyfriend, Paul. Stuart, Maurice’s former partner, comes drunk to the studio to collect what he thinks he is owed. The law holds across a range wide for a domestic film, from farce to grief, and its strain shows at the margins: Stuart obeys a darker law of failure and resentment that the film touches and drops, and Monica and some of the clients belong to a broader comedy than the café’s.
This is where the film gives. The main line resists the subtractive test, but the middle hour does not. The sittings run longer than their point needs and repeat their pattern once it is set; Stuart’s visit opens a strand of Maurice’s past that is only half used; Roxanne’s quarrels restate her anger more than they advance it. The middle hour crosscuts between the households in ordinary grammar, and the score at times underlines what the scenes have already shown. The joints show between the households before the barbecue binds them, and the film is long for what it must carry.
Movement III
The two women meet, and the camera sets them side by side at a café table, in one static two-shot held without a cut. Cynthia denies it; then a memory surfaces on her face; then the tears, and the slow turn to tenderness. The recognition happens in real time and in the frame, to both women at once. The camera does not cut to faces or isolate reactions, and the viewer is not spared the waiting. It is the centre of the film and one of the strongest passages of screen acting of its decade.
Here the form is the knowledge. What the film knows is that truth between people arrives slowly, awkwardly and in shared time, and the long take is the instrument that shows it. Set against the sittings, where faces are posed and cut short, this face cannot be posed and is held. Told with conventional coverage, a reaction shot at each turn and a swelling cue beneath, the scene would become what the plot of an adoption melodrama expects; held as it is, the same events become an endurance, and the viewer shares it. Dickson’s strings, here and elsewhere, sometimes do work the take was built to do, and that is the form’s one cost in its great scenes.
The making is the acting, devised with the cast in long preparation and held in takes that leave nowhere to hide. Blethyn’s Cynthia is nervous, self-pitying, funny and finally whole; Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Hortense is composed and watchful, and the take is carried between them. Pope’s photography is plain and serves them, and Gregory’s cutting knows when not to cut. The elevation is of tears, not of terror or transport, and it comes rarely: the café is the first of three summits in a film that, by design, mostly declines height.
Movement IV
Roxanne turns twenty-one, and the family gathers for a barbecue at Maurice’s house. Cynthia brings Hortense and passes her off as a friend from work. The table is staged in long takes and held whole, so that when the truth comes out it lands on everyone together, and others follow it: Monica’s childlessness, the cost of Maurice’s smoothing, what Cynthia has kept from Roxanne. Cynthia cries out, the room holds in silence, and Maurice speaks. His outburst names the film: “secrets and lies.” The speech is earned, because he has spent the film fixing smiles for strangers.
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a family is kept together by secrets told to spare one another, the sparing has become the injury, and only the truth, told at cost and in company, gives kinship a floor. Each secret is a lie of protection, and the film proves the claim four times at one table. Beside it stands a quieter truth about class. Cynthia’s poverty and loneliness are shown without condescension, and Hortense’s professional ease beside her makes class as real a gap as race. The figure is held where it is by two things: race, set up as the great difference, is almost bracketed once the women meet, and the ending will console more fully than this disclosure strictly allows.
The pattern beneath the table is old. A child given away at birth returns grown and is recognised by her mother at a feast, and her return brings the family’s hidden wounds into the open: it is the recognition of late romance, the daughter restored in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, and here it is built into the structure, since the whole film is the approach to one recognition and its consequence at a table. The particular stays fiercely particular, a box factory, a council broom, a new conservatory, sausages. The realism keeps the archetype under the surface, recognisable rather than remade, and Hortense, the returning child, is the least mythic figure in the film.
Movement V
The film ends in Cynthia’s back garden: three women, tea, sunlight and small talk. It has a plain grace, and it is the film’s mercy. Whether the mercy is earned is one of the questions the film leaves open, with what Cynthia will not tell Hortense about her father, whether race is transcended or avoided, and what Monica’s house means once its secret is known. Thirty years of return show that the questions are real and that Blethyn’s performance yields again, its comic gestures carrying the secret from the start. But the return is more to performance and texture than to new meaning, and once the secrets are known the design is legible.
The film carried a devised, improvised realism to its fullest emotional reach and showed that the method could hold a large audience with a plot of revelation, without giving up duration and awkwardness. It perfected a manner already its maker’s rather than reorganising what film could do, and its reach ran mostly to Leigh’s later career, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, Another Year and Mr. Turner, and to performance. It survives whole, kept on home video and television and in retrospectives and teaching, with a presence continuous but not wide, and a surface of mid-1990s London that ages as period because the film is about those conditions.
What holds the film in Tier III is the axes of consequence. Its making, its form and its disclosure stand in the range of the tier above; but its swerve was taken on a cleared path, its reach ran to its maker, its myth is carried lightly, its elevation is rare and its return is to performance more than to meaning, and each of these stands below the film’s own standing of 7.7. Naked, its maker’s darker film, stands at 7.9; Short Cuts and The Piano, the auteur dramas of its moment that swerved further, at 8.2. Within its range the film is exact: three households, two generations, labour, class and the state at one point brought to a single table, and a truth told there that the garden afterwards keeps.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the film as released, and its main line resists the subtractive test. The funeral frees Hortense to search and sets her grief beside Cynthia’s later one; the records office gives the search its cost before it begins; the café take cannot be cut, nor the barbecue, where every earlier strand is paid. What gives is in the middle hour. The sittings run longer than their point needs and repeat their pattern once it is set; Stuart’s drunken visit to the studio opens a strand of Maurice’s past that is only half used; Roxanne’s quarrels with Paul restate her anger more than they advance it. The film is long for what it must carry.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a family is kept together by secrets told to spare one another, the sparing has become the injury, and only the truth, told at cost and in company, gives kinship a floor. Cynthia’s lost child, Monica’s childlessness masked as house-pride, a silence Cynthia keeps from Roxanne about a father, Maurice’s part as the brother who pays and smooths: each is a lie of protection, exposed at one table. Beside it stands a truth about class, Cynthia’s poverty and loneliness shown without condescension. What holds the figure: race, set up as the great difference, is almost bracketed once the women meet, and the ending consoles more fully than the disclosure strictly allows.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The register is domestic and comic, and elevation comes rarely, by design. It comes three times. In the café the long take lets a recognition happen in real time: Cynthia’s denial, a memory surfacing on her face, tears, a slow turn to tenderness, all without a cut. At the barbecue the truth breaks over the table, Cynthia’s cry and Maurice’s speech, and the room holds in silence. The garden at the end has a plain grace. Andrew Dickson’s strings lift each of these and sometimes push. What holds the figure is frequency and kind: long stretches of level comedy and irritation lie between the summits, and the height is of tears rather than of terror or transport.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The pattern is old and bears weight: the child given away at birth returns grown, is recognised by her mother at a feast, and her return brings the family’s hidden wounds into the open. It is the recognition of late romance, the daughter restored in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, built into the structure, since the whole film is the approach to one recognition. Maurice adds a second figure, the maker of images who cannot see his own house. The particular stays fiercely particular: a box factory, a council broom, a new conservatory, sausages. What holds the figure: the realism keeps the archetype under the surface, recognisable rather than remade, and Hortense, the returning child, is the least mythic figure in the film.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is double: British social realism, from the kitchen-sink films to Ken Loach and Leigh’s own High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990) and Naked (1993), and the adoption melodrama of the lost child found. The turn is to play the melodrama inside the realist method, so that its big scenes arrive as embarrassment and duration rather than as climax, and to cast the returning child as a Black professional and the mother as white and working poor, declining race as the problem the plot expects. The stake is limited. Naked had won Leigh the director’s prize at Cannes three years before: the swerve is real, on a path its maker had already cleared.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that truth between people arrives slowly, awkwardly and in shared time. The long take is the instrument. In the café both women stay in frame, side by side, with no cut to faces or reactions, and the viewer watches the recognition happen to both at once. The barbecue table is held whole, so that the revelation lands on everyone together. Against this stands the counterform of the sittings, short, posed and cut, every face arranged for the camera: the posed image against the endured. Told with conventional coverage, it would become an adoption melodrama. What holds the figure: the middle hour crosscuts in ordinary grammar, and the score at times does the takes’ work.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Thirty years of evidence. The open questions are real: what Cynthia will not tell Hortense about her father; whether the garden ending is earned or a mercy the film grants itself; whether race is transcended or avoided; what Monica’s childlessness, once known, does to her house and her coolness to Cynthia. Performances yield on return, Blethyn’s above all, whose gestures read first as comic and carry the secret from the start. Criticism has gathered chiefly on Leigh’s method and on the café take, steady but not wide. What holds the figure: the return is more to performance and texture than to new meaning, and once the secrets are known the design is legible and its open questions few.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the film carried a devised, improvised realism to its fullest emotional reach and showed that the method could hold a large audience with a plot of revelation, without giving up duration and awkwardness. It perfected a manner already its maker’s rather than reorganising what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or and five Academy Award nominations brought the method to an international audience and helped make Leigh a director financed on his own terms, which Vera Drake, Another Year and Mr. Turner used. Descent in other films is diffuse and not credited; the reach ran to its maker and to performance, not to the field’s grammar.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and any restoration is repair. Presence is continuous but not wide: a Palme d’Or winner kept on home video and television, shown in its director’s retrospectives and in teaching on acting and British cinema, less circulated than the most watched art films of its decade and carried in part by its director’s name. The surface ages as period rather than fashion: the box factory, the council sweepers, the new-build estate and the high-street studio fix it to mid-1990s London, but the film is about those conditions. Thirty years, and a narrow presence, hold it at the bar.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, and here the acting is the medium’s means, devised in long preparation and held in takes that leave nowhere to hide. Brenda Blethyn’s Cynthia, nervous, self-pitying, funny and finally whole, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Hortense, composed and watchful, carry the café take between them; Timothy Spall’s Maurice holds the film’s decency and exhaustion in the body. Dick Pope’s photography is plain and frames the barbecue table with exactness; Jon Gregory’s cutting knows when not to cut. The charges fall where they matter: Monica and some clients in the sittings are drawn toward caricature, the score underlines what the takes have shown, and the middle hour is slack.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a client grinning for Maurice’s camera, played for comedy, and Cynthia’s cry at the barbecue table. One law governs both: the face a person shows is arranged for others, and the truth beneath it costs to bring out. The studio is the law at rest, the barbecue the law broken open; Monica’s spotless house, Roxanne’s sullen silence and the calm of Hortense, who looks into strangers’ eyes for a living, obey it. The range is wide for a domestic film, from farce to grief. What holds the figure: Stuart’s visit obeys a darker law the film touches and drops, some caricature belongs to a broader comedy, and the garden resolves the law gently.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what a feature film holds. The family is held fully, across three households and two generations, with a death at the start and a birth long ago at the centre. Labour is specific: a box factory, street sweeping, a photographic business, a professional practice. Class is held as lived difference, in houses, speech and money, and race as a fact of a city. The state enters once, in the adoption records and the social worker. Consciousness is shared, most fully Cynthia’s and Maurice’s, and all of it is one movement. What holds the figure at 7.0: history is absent, the sacred enters only at a graveside, the natural order and the wider city scarcely appear, and race is declared and then set aside.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.1 and The Living Form at 8.0. A film whole in its one version and present for thirty years; a disclosure that the lies told to protect a family have become its injury, proved four times at one table; acting devised with the cast and held in long takes that leave nowhere to hide; and a form that sets the posed image against the endured one.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: the family, labour, class and the state at one point held in one movement, with history, the sacred and the natural order absent and race declared and then set aside. Above it, The Sublime at 7.3, an elevation rare by design and of tears rather than transport; then The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 7.4, a turn taken on a path its maker had already cleared, and a return more to performance than to new meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable meets the bar of 8.5 exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.1, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, Pressure on Tradition at 7.5 and The Swerve at 7.4 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.3, The Swerve, 7.4, and The Bottomless Well, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Secrets & Lies as released in 1996, in its one version, from the graveside to the garden: written and directed by Mike Leigh, the script devised with the cast; produced by Simon Channing Williams for Thin Man Films, with CiBy 2000 and Channel Four Films; photographed by Dick Pope, edited by Jon Gregory, with music by Andrew Dickson; with Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall, Phyllis Logan, Claire Rushbrook, Lee Ross, Elizabeth Berrington, Ron Cook and Lesley Manville. The film is in English and is judged as heard. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, in one phrase, and is otherwise described. Leigh’s earlier and later films are named only as the film’s inheritance and as evidence of its reach, never credited to it. Facts that could not be verified, among them the running time, the length of the café take, the aspect ratio, the shooting dates and the length of the preparation, the full list and order of the studio sittings, the particulars of the father about whom Cynthia keeps silent, accounts of what the actors knew before the café scene, and claims of the film’s use as a model in teaching actors and directors, are not given.