A ‘Cruel Radiance’: Reconciliation in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies

A number of books have been published recently on the topic of reconciliation as a Christian practice. These studies express a desire for reconciliation in situations of conflict, and the difficulty in achieving it. Perhaps most notable in these discussions is the tension between an ideal of reconciliation and the fraught realities of practice. Gregory Baum, a Canadian theologian, contends that reconciliation is a ministry of the church in situations of conflict and hostility, a ministry the church rarely exercises (Baum and Wells, 1997: 184, 185). Stan McKay and Janet Silman, in their dialogue about a process that led to an All Native Circle Conference within the United Church of Canada, express scepticism about reconciliation as an empty ideal, lacking clear parameters about what acts and gestures define a practice of reconciliation. They define reconciliation as a process of healing in ‘struggles for the fullness of human life shared. The ongoing struggle to be fully human’ (Baum and Wells, 1997: 182). This struggle involves healing within people, as well as acts of forgiveness and reparation between groups of people.

Books offering theological reflection on reconciliation tend to accentuate either the interpersonal and internal process of reconciliation or social forms of reparation.1 Yet both approaches envision some ideal of wholeness toward which acts of reconciliation move. These theological visions of wholeness express an orthodox ideal of God’s reconciliation with humans through the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, a social gospel vision of a just social order, or some blend of the two. Visions of wholeness can function as a kind of polestar, out of reach yet offering a sense of direction. The political risk of such ideals of wholeness is that they do not really offer any guidance as to what concrete acts will bring about reconciliation. Such an ideal may also imply that reconciliation must be whole and complete in order to be real, which devalues partial and fragmentary acts of reparation.

In Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology, Kathleen Sands argues that ‘if the good is presumed to be single or harmonious, whatever is fragile, conflicted, or incomplete cannot be truly good’ (1997: 39). Much like Christian theologians reflecting on reconciliation, Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies is about the tension between the ideals and practical efforts of reconciliation. Leigh gives patient attention in Secrets and Lies to fragmentary and incomplete acts of reconciliation, yet he also evokes the thrall of a vision of wholeness, indulged to the point of melodrama in a penultimate reconciliation scene, and accentuated once more in the final sequence of the film.

Mike Leigh’s grey realism

If we understand reconciliation as acts of making visible what has been hidden or misunderstood, then reconciliation is expressed in Leigh’s style of filming Secrets and Lies. Leigh draws into the field of vision what is usually outside the cinematic frame. He gives us a close and compassionate look at everyday human realities as the tensive ‘lamentation and... celebration of... human experience’ (Fuller, 1995: xxxiii). A distinct style of characterization forms part of the texture of Leigh’s films. In his words, ‘part of the actual substance, narrative, thematic - the content of my films - is the detailed study of how people actually behave... The characterizations are very detailed in terms of actual physical, rhythmic speech patterns - like real people’ (Ellickson and Porton, 1994: 12). For Leigh, there is a peculiar vibrancy in representations of ordinary time: ‘the real world that one actually lived in seemed to me exciting and extraordinary in its stark, grey, reality’ (Fuller, 1995: xii). The American writer, James Agee, contends that sheer effort is required to describe the real world and the weight and dignity of human beings, an ‘effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is’ (Agee and Evans, 1941: 11). In Leigh’s film, this ‘cruel radiance’ emerges in his acute representation of human capacities for destruction and pain in relationship, and human capacities for healing and communion. Human damage and human efforts to connect are enduring realities of reconciliation.

The story of Secrets and Lies is this. Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young black optometrist, begins a search for her birth mother after the death of her adoptive mother. To her surprise, she discovers that her birth mother is a white woman, Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn), who lives with her daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), in a small flat. Cynthia works at a box factory, and her daughter works for ‘the Council’, sweeping the streets. Cynthia and Roxanne barely tolerate each other’s presence, engaging in verbal and sometimes physical sparring. Cynthia’s brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), a successful photographer, and his wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan) have no children, and their relationship is often tense and argumentative.

Hortense’s first telephone contact with Cynthia shocks and terrifies her mother, yet Hortense’s kind and persistent desire to get to know her brings hope into Cynthia’s life. Cynthia keeps her meetings with Hortense a secret from other members of her family. Yet she insists upon bringing a ‘friend,’ her daughter Hortense, to a twenty-first birthday party for Roxanne organized by Maurice and Monica. The friction between Cynthia and Monica contributes to an untimely revelation about who Hortense really is, and the party is thrown into chaos with Roxanne’s rage and the disbelief and consternation of the others. Maurice redirects the intense feelings of the family into confessions of the secrets and lies that presently thwart their relationships. The secret of who Hortense’s father is remains undisclosed. The final scene, in Cynthia’s backyard, reinforces the themes of the previous reconciliation sequence, in a conversation between the half-sisters, Hortense and Roxanne, about the hurt caused by lies and the need to tell the truth.

The self is like a house

The sheer complexity of Leigh’s Secrets and Lies makes it a very difficult film to write about. To consider the damage and repair to relationships as represented in the film, it may be helpful to consider the domestic space of several characters and what this space reveals about their personal histories. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard considers the house as a metaphor for human being. This metaphor suggests that, like houses, humans are both open and closed. Humans, like the doors and windows of a house, are animated by movements of opening and closing: ‘On the surface of being, in that region where being wants to be visible and hidden, the movements of opening and closing are so numerous, so frequently inverted, and so charged with hesitation, that we could conclude on the following formula: man is half-open being’ (1994: 222). The fluidity of opening and closing can be arrested through pain and suffering so that a person becomes locked into a static openness or closure.

Cynthia’s house suggests that the damage she has suffered in relationships has left her excessively and sometimes unattractively open. An upstairs room leaks when it rains, prompting her to say, ‘It’s like Niagara Falls up there.’ When Maurice prods the hole in the ceiling, Cynthia tells him that ‘the ’ole lot’s going to come down’ (Leigh, 1997: 37). This room is full of the unsorted belongings of their parents. Cynthia’s often unbearable fragility is suggested by the hole that hasn’t been repaired, which leaks every time rain weighs it down, and which is likely to collapse on the junk left by the parents.

Small irritants from the outside threaten to break her down, mostly from her daughter, Roxanne, with the risk that she will dissolve under the weight. She often tells Roxanne about the loss of her mother at the age of ten and the burdens this imposed upon her, but she is ignored as a whiner (Leigh, 1997: 6). Similarly, Maurice’s wife Monica has no sympathy for Cynthia’s difficulties as a single mother raising a daughter. Cynthia’s factory job, cutting slits in pieces of cardboard for boxes, has a verbal and connotative association with ‘slag’, a term Roxanne uses to abuse her when she discovers that she has a half-sister: ‘Don’t you touch me or I will smack you, you slag. You fuckin’ slag!!’ (Leigh, 1997: 94).

Roxanne associates her mother with a despised openness. In fact, Cynthia’s pain holds her in a kind of arrested openness. She is perceived by others as an incessant talker. Monica calls her a ‘hysterical nutter’ (Leigh, 1997: 75), and Roxanne repeatedly tells her to shut up. Cynthia’s tendency to fill space with talk is given visual expression in the carnival of ornaments on every shelf in her house. Her love for her daughter is similarly cluttered and indirect, to which Roxanne responds with verbal and physical violence. Cynthia tells Maurice that Roxanne wants as a birthday gift, ‘me under a bus’ or ‘me ’ead in the oven’ (Leigh, 1997: 35). Yet Leigh’s close attention to their relationship suggests that the routine violence of Cynthia’s and Roxanne’s relationship emerges out of their mutual vulnerability and their yearning for connection.

By contrast, the adopted daughter, Hortense, who searches for Cynthia, has responded to pain by closing herself in. Hortense’s flat is sparely furnished, the furniture forming cool geometric shapes and lines on blank walls. Just before Roxanne’s birthday party she stands still, looking out of her window, her hair bound up in a spiral, forming one of the quiet shapes in the room. As an optometrist, she is associated with seeing, which is often aligned with detached rational thought and wide-ranging perception. Her empty walls allude to her observation that her mother loved her, but that she never really knew her. Her adoptive family didn’t really talk about her adoption, leaving Hortense with a certain blankness about her past. Hortense tells Cynthia about how she learned, at age seven on a flight home from the Bahamas, that she was adopted. ‘Little girl... was yer upset?’ Cynthia asks. Hortense replies, ‘I just looked out at the clouds.’ Her expressions of pain are direct and clear. She asks Cynthia, ‘Why didn’t you wanna see me?’ and when Cynthia misinterprets the question, ‘I mean, when I was born.’ A bit later Hortense asks, ‘Haven’t you ever thought about me?’ (Leigh, 1997: 55).

The birthday party

The tensions among the characters in the film are fully charged in a penultimate sequence, when everyone is gathered in one space for Roxanne’s twenty-first birthday party, hosted by Maurice and Monica. The tensions between ideal and real are especially acute here. Monica gives a tour of the house, commenting on the tranquil peach tones of the bathroom, which contrasts with the verbal sniping between her and her husband. The living-room and kitchen are painted green, suggesting life, when in fact Monica’s bitterness about her inability to bear children is destroying her marriage. She shows off her bedroom and its white four-poster bed, and Cynthia says, ‘I can see Maurice thrashing about in there!’, the obvious sexual connotations repressed by Monica’s retort, ‘It is a king size’ (Leigh, 1997: 79).

Monica and Cynthia find each other distressing. Their personalities abrade and they hurt each other. Paul Clements characterizes such conflict in another Leigh film: ‘It’s about the casual damage of human relationships’ (1985: 84). The image Monica hopes for is captured by Jane who describes the bed as ‘like somethin’ out of a fairy tale!’ (Leigh, 1997: 80). The real and ideal are at odds, and anger is often used to solidify these unattainable ideals. For Cynthia, the material display of the house, the attention her daughter Roxanne receives from her aunt and uncle, and finally the birthday card from them with an extravagant sum of money, seems to evoke in her a jealous desire to shock them with the revelation that her sophisticated and elegant ‘friend’ Hortense is actually her daughter.

The revelation is followed by an electrical storm of recriminations and abuse. Yet Maurice is able to bring about significant acts of reconciliation. He brings Roxanne back to the house when she runs away, telling her that resolving things requires some simple and difficult gestures: ‘You gotta face up to it!’ (Leigh, 1997: 96) and ‘you just have to listen’ (Leigh, 1997: 98). Maurice directs the truth telling that follows, insisting on hearing the painful stories that have been hidden inside secrets and lies. Cynthia tells about Roxanne’s father, and the birth of her two daughters. Maurice reveals Monica’s inability to have children, since she is incapable of saying the words. Maurice expresses his pain in trying to love three people - his sister, his niece and his wife - who hate each other. Tears are shed, Monica and Cynthia embrace, and Roxanne listens without attacking her mother when she cries, ‘Please, Roxanne... sweet’eart... please!!’ (Leigh, 1997: 101), for once accepting her oblique expression of love. It does seem a bit like a fairy tale.

Damage and repair

This scene is often criticized as overly melodramatic; the extensive reconciliation miraculous and unreal, given Leigh’s own postulate of grey realism. While I tend to agree with the charge of melodrama, another possible interpretation is a happy ending according to the conventions of a tragicomic mode, achieved ‘only by coincidence and wild improbability... [where] there is resolution only for a moment’ (Bynum, 1991: 24). We must keep in mind that, as a photographer, Maurice has elicited many brief smiles that disappear when the camera flash fades. The rapprochement that occurs following Cynthia’s revelation does not erase the personal histories that form indubitable sources of estrangement. The reconciliation scene leaves one important secret untold. Cynthia is incapable of telling Hortense about her father. We know that Cynthia gave up her daughter without even looking at her. But we never learn why she has a violent physical reaction at receiving the first call from Hortense, and why she refuses to speak about Hortense’s father. When Hortense asks, ‘Was my father a nice man?’ Cynthia says, ‘Oh, don’t break my heart darlin’!’ (Leigh, 1997: 101), and begins to sob uncontrollably. Some secrets are so wounding that they are unspeakable.

The space in which reconciliation happens, Monica’s and Maurice’s home, is rife with contradictions between the actual and the possible, and thus suggests a yearning for full and complete reconciliation and the difficulties in achieving it. Leigh’s representation of their house and of Maurice’s profession as a photographer seems to be a gentle irony about the space in which a fragile practice of reconciliation occurs - electrically charged with tensions between ideal and real.

Yet the criticism of melodrama is warranted in the final two scenes of Secrets and Lies. It seems to me that the tension that exists throughout the film, between real and ideal, is relaxed in the final scenes. Leigh slips into the space of the ideal in the reconciliation scene at Roxanne’s birthday party, which resolves the tensions between characters through truth telling. After the exposure of the hurt beneath the secrets and lies, the final scene of the film takes place in Cynthia’s back yard. Her two daughters stand looking into a dilapidated greenhouse filled with junk. The junk piled up here, Cynthia’s parents’ belongings, once filled an upstairs room in the house. Cynthia’s clearing of the past through story telling is followed by a physical act of removing her parents’ junk from her flat. This suggests a hopefulness that there will be more room for Cynthia in her own house and in the present, since her past has been housecleaned. The greenhouse, though broken down, connotes growth and renewal. The effect on Roxanne is dramatic. She is smiling for the first time in the film, as the half-sisters discuss how Roxanne will introduce Hortense to her friends. Hortense says, ‘Best to tell the truth, innit?...That way, nobody gets ’urt’ (Leigh, 1997: 103). Hortense and Roxanne have tea with their mother, and enjoy the afternoon.

Conclusion

The sense of experienced wholeness and reparation that prevails in the final two scenes of Secrets and Lies mutes an insight patiently developed throughout the film to this point: that human goodness is fragile and often fraught with pain and shame. This fragile goodness means that reconciliation happens in a precarious space, within an electric difference between what we hope for and what we can actually achieve. In this space, reconciliation becomes an act of hope that renewal is possible through the hard work of listening to another’s pain, of coming to terms with unpalatable realities and injustices, and making changes so that pain can be lessened.

Reconciliation requires moving toward the other with a mixture of toughness about the wrongs committed and compassion for recalcitrant human limitations, acts of reparation that are particularly observable in Hortense and Maurice. Until the last two scenes of the film, relations between the characters suggest that small acts of reconciliation are important and necessary, and gradually lead to other small changes. These acts happen in the space of enduring human habits of estrangement and human desires for communion.

The final scenes suggest a dissolution of suffering and pain through storytelling that brings about harmony where the disturbances of suffering are cast off. This implies that reconciliation must be whole and complete in order to be real. To suggest in the final scene that truth telling avoids hurt, rather than provoking pain and perhaps deepening it, forecloses the insights in other parts of the film, that truth may incapacitate and wound as much as it may heal, and that a great deal of human conflict remains perpetually unresolved and vibrantly real in its irresolution. For most of Secrets and Lies, Leigh gives close attention to fragmentary and small acts of reconciliation as real and important acts of reparation, yet the final two scenes enact a full and complete reconciliation which obviates the film’s lamenting celebration of a more fragile and fraught practice.

I would like to thank the World Association for Christian Communication for inviting me to give this paper as a plenary panel address at the Third International Conference on Media, Religion and Culture at Edinburgh University, Scotland on 22 July 1999. David Heckerl read several drafts of this paper and offered incisive criticism and commentary, and helpful questions were raised by Jeffrey Mahan, Jim Dean, and Gretchen Brabander.

Note

1 A recent study that develops an interpersonal account of reconciliation is Curtiss Paul DeYoung’s Reconciliation: Our greatest challenge - Our only hope (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1997). Studies that examine reconciliation as a social practice include Donald Shriver’s An ethic for enemies: Forgiveness in politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Robert J. Schreiter’s Reconciliation: Mission and ministry in a changing social order (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1987), and The reconciliation of peoples: Challenge to the churches (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), edited by Gregory Baum and Harold Wells.

References

Agee, James and Walker Evans. 1960. Let us now praise famous men. New York: Ballantine Books.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The poetics of space. trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

Baum, Gregory and Harold Wells, eds. 1997. The reconciliation of peoples: Challenge to the churches. Maryknoll: Orbis.

Bynum, Carolyn Walker. 1991. In praise of fragments: History in the comic mode. Fragmentation and redemption: Essays on gender and the human body in Medieval religion. New York: Zone Books.

Clements, Paul. 1983. The improvised play: The work of Mike Leigh. London: Methuen.

DeYoung, Paul Curtiss. 1997. Reconciliation: Our greatest challenge - Our only hope. Valley Forge: Judson Press.

Ellickson, Lee and Richard Porton. 1994. I find the tragicomic things in life: An interview with Mike Leigh. Cineaste. vol. 20, no. 3: 10-17.

Fuller, Graham. 1995. Mike Leigh’s original features. Naked and other screen plays. London: Faber and Faber.

Leigh, Mike. 1997. Secrets and lies. London: Faber and Faber.

McKay, Stanley and Janet Silman. 1997. A First Nations movement in a Canadian church. The reconciliation of peoples: Challenge to the churches. eds. Gregory Baum and Harold Wells. Maryknoll: Orbis.

Sands, Kathleen M. 1994. Escape from paradise: Evil and tragedy in feminist theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Schreiter, Robert J. 1987. Reconciliation: Mission and ministry in a changing social order. Maryknoll: Orbis.

Shriver, Donald. 1995. An ethic for enemies: Forgiveness in politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alyda Faber is a doctoral candidate in theology at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her research interests include violence as a theological problem and religious vision in film.