Secrets and lies who is hortenses father

Stuart—stubbly, pouring booze into his tea, unkempt and hoarse—accuses Maurice of essentially carpetbagging his old business, all but stealing the fruit of his labors.

Maurice, raising himself up to his full height, withstands the long index finger that Stuart never quite puts in his sternum. No, Maurice says, I built this up by myself. I got these clients myself. I do the shoots myself. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content. Mike Leigh. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Really enjoyed this -- and I guess the name Cumberbatch isn't as unusual as I thought. Quinoa 31 May Mike Leigh's my kind of filmmaker. This is a man who just loves people, especially the ones who have a lot of emotional baggage. Leigh has good taste and he knows how to steer the ship when it comes to getting a group of actors together and getting them to reveal things through the characters.

We never see the father - no need to, it was one of those bad moments in teenage years that isn't easily forgotten, but it's been put into a corner of memory for Brenda Blethyn's Cynthia at this point in her life in this story. What I mean to say is that race is not unacknowledged here, but it's not the primary focus.

The people in this film are relatively working class - perhaps doing a little better than not are Hortense, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, is an Optometrist, and Maurice, Timothy Spall, the brother of Cynthia, runs a photography studio - but we see that they have the work that they do and the people they're close to.

That's it, and that's what counts for Leigh. And yet, as a great dramatist, it's right there in front of me, in the subtext of Leigh's scenario and in what the characters say as much as the up-front stuff Maurice's marriage for example.

There's time taken to set up the characters, and I loved that about the film as well. A soap might just dive right into the 'Who is your birth mother' plot-line, or maybe after so much uninteresting time setting up people, to the point of who cares.

But we know who they are with just their behavior - Cynthia's fragile form, her daughter's 'Leave me alone mum! Some of those montages, by the way, are simply delightful, full of the kind of empathy that can be seen from a filmmaker in just flashes: even as they're just sketches of people, they feel fully realized, albeit once or twice as jokes.

So that when Maurice does this, and then goes home to his wife and the OK-but-tense relationship there, we know where his head may be at. Also interesting is the fact that we aren't shown that Maurice and Cynthia are brothers right away - why are their stories connected, if at all - until he comes over to her house and that itself is a tremendous scene. This is the sort of cinematic experience that had me on the edge of my seat merely by the emotional stakes of those involved.

How the family may or may not find out isn't as crucial as how it will affect them, how we might or just will be affected by them. Blethyn may be shedding a lot of tears here, but she's playing a damaged, depressed person, and it never comes into question why she acts the way she does, and Leigh, as with his other films especially the even more uncomfortable-in-a-good-way Naked never judges. Other characters may do that to others, especially as things rile high to the surface, but he won't.

You want to know what happens to these people once the film ends, and Leigh leaves you wanting more, genuinely so, not in any cheap way. Theo Robertson 18 March This is the sort of movie that the deluded British film industry loves and the average British film goer hates - A low concept drama about a woman trying to find her birth mother.

There is of course an argument that the plot is both real and sensible , especially if you compare it with a plot about humans , hobbits , elves and dwarfs going on a dangerous quest and fighting massed armies of goblins , but be brutally honest , what film would you prefer to watch?

As always Brenda Blethyn is very good , Marianne Jean Baptiste is average at best as is Timothy Spall but Phyllis Logan is terrible , notice how she speaks one line with a northern regional English accent then speaks a couple of more lines in a broad Scottish accent?

What , you noticed? Maybe he fell asleep while making this. I know I fell asleep watching it. I saw that two sets of Mike Leigh's films are being issued, and that he is a five-time Oscar nominee. I was not disappointed to say the least. I can easily understand through this film what my grandmother went through when my father showed up on her doorstep after 60 years.

I imagine that she had the same anguish and disbelief that was so capably expressed by Cynthia Rose Brenda Blethyn. Blethyn was so good in Little Voice, and just as exciting in this film. The cast also included Peter Pettigrew from the Harry Potter films. He was also Beadle in Sweeney Todd. Timothy Spall played Cynthia's brother Maurice, and did a really super job.

I kept thinking whenever the two of them were together that there was something that was tearing them apart I was guessing incest. Of course, we won't know all until the end, but it was captivating. She was absolutely radiant and quite a great actress. The story wasn't just about the out-of-wedlock child given up, but also other secrets and lies that kept this family from functioning as they should. It is something that can hit home with every viewer of this film.

I found personal messages and I am sure that others will, too. Should be emotional, but instead is boring and irritating. The central plot of Secrets and Lies had heaps of potential: a goes in search of and is reunited with her birth mother. That in itself would make for a great character-driven, emotional movie. Unfortunately, the finished product doesn't live up to this potential. It drags along throughout and never gets going. Mike Leigh likes to start his movies slowly and build momentum, but this doesn't even get out of first gear.

Plus, just when you thought the movie was already too long, you have random, pointless scenes that add nothing to the movie, eg the when the previous owner of the photography studio comes back.

Throw into the mix the fact that Brenda Blethyn's character, Cynthia, has to be one of the more irritating characters in movie history: constantly whining, screeching and nagging, interspersed with random crying.

Unfortunately, she is in just about every scene, so it's like constant nails-across-a-chalkboard, all through the movie.

The remainder of the cast don't do much to help the movie, either. Timothy Spall and Phyllis Logan are incredibly dull, or, at least, the characters they played were.

There are some good moments, however. Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives a great performance as Hortense. I found her character the only likable and engaging one in the entire movie.

Excellent Mike Leigh film about a working-class woman Brenda Blethyn in an unhappy relationship with her own daughter who's surprised when another daughter Marianne Jean-Baptiste , the product of an affair with a black man and who she gave up for adoption, seeks her out. Though the abandoned daughter is part black, "Secrets and Lies" isn't primarily a movie about race. Instead, it's a movie about mothers and daughters, and the good and bad qualities each can bring out in the other.

Blethyn's character quickly forms a closer bond with the newly-discovered daughter, a successful and articulate optometrist, than she has with the one she's raised, a sullen and surly nightmare, much to that daughter's anger and envy.

The movie has that fly-on-the-wall quality common to Leigh's films; we don't feel like we're watching actors play parts, so completely does the cast he assembles here inhabit their characters. Shortly after her parents pass away, Hortense Marianne Jean-Baptiste goes in search of her biological mother.

And this time, there are some surprises on the paperwork the service gives her. And her bio-mom is having her own issues, with the other offspring, maurice Spall and cynthia Blethyn.

While paul has become rich and successful, he has been less than welcoming to the other members of the family. But, with Hortense entering the picture, many family secrets are about to see the light of day! Really good! I liked this one. Recommend this one. Timothy Spall currently has three projects in production.

Written and directed by british Mike Leigh. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Hortense, adopted at birth but now grown up, starts to try and trace her mother. Roxanne drives her mother crazy. Maurice never speaks to his niece. Cynthia has a shock for her family. Monica can't talk to her husband. Hortense has never met her mother. Rated R for language.

Did you know Edit. Trivia To add a spontaneous effect to the performances, Mike Leigh met with each actor individually and only told them what their character would know at the beginning of the film. As filming progressed the actors were hearing the secrets for the very first time. Brenda Blethyn , for instance, didn't know that Marianne Jean-Baptiste was black. Goofs When Roxanne pushes Cynthia onto the bed, the shadow of a crew member's head is seen moving on the bed. Quotes Maurice : Secrets and lies!

User reviews Review. Top review. Each is stunned to find something about the other that neither knew: that the mother is white and the daughter is black! Rather than help one another, each suffers alone, while every lie they so readily spin must constantly be fed with more deception. There isn't an air of judgment or lecturing morality, no attempt to make a sweeping commentary of society.

If any such message is delivered it must be derived from the story. Phrases like "you look like a slapped horse" and "I wouldn't know him if he stood up in my soup" are not written by hacks an apt description for most of the extremely well-paid Hollywood film writers.

Perhaps the plot takes a little time to develop, but the end is full of surprises. Here he gives us Hortense, whose name would have been Elizabeth Pearly, had her mother not given her up for adoption. I've already mentioned Blethyn, who also was honored at Cannes, but Jean-Baptiste, and Spall, in particular, are tremendous.

A great movie. Of course behind all of this is a beautiful moral, and that's where the film really shines. Hortense Marianne Jean-Baptiste , a young Black professional woman, decides, on the death of both her Black foster parents, to seek out her biological mother.

Nevertheless, it is a great motion picture. If any such message is delivered it must be derived from the story.