MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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Like
Breaking the Waves, Secrets and Lies
is brilliantly effective as we get
to know its characters, but loses credibility in its unconvincing denoue–
ment. Mike Leigh is renowned for developing scripts through months of
improvisations that are a cross between acting exercises and encounter ses–
sions. Here the premise is improbable: a cultivated black woman who was
once given up for adoption seeks out her birth mother, who turns out to
be white. Both of them are shocked, but ultimately the newcomer brings
to a head a series of family conflicts which are then all too easily resolved.
Brenda B1ethyn plays a working-class woman whose life is a mess: she has
a daughter who can't stand her, who is on the verge of repeating her
mother's mistakes, and a younger brother, played by Spall, whose wife is
childless, bitter, and a perfect snob. Leigh's goal is to expose the buried
humani ty of each of these characters by having them face up to the secrets
that have poisoned their lives and alienated them from each other. When
the movie works - as when B1ethyn first hysterically rejects, then gradu–
ally comes to accept her black daughter, or when Spall, a photographer, is
reaching out to all the unhappy women who make up his family - it's as
if Jean Renoir were using
cinema verite
to make an English version of
An
American Family.
But by glossing over the racial barriers for family issues,
and by leading us to a heartwarming Hollywood ending, Leigh partly
defaults on the intricate reality he and his actors have so beautifully built
up.
The same quiet authenticity we have come to expect from Leigh is
also writ large in Assayas's depiction of the filmmaking process in
Irma Vep.
Films about making movies are usually bitterly satirical like Altman's
The
Player,
farcical like Tom DiCillo's recent
Living in Oblivion,
or reverential
and navel-gazing like Truffaut's
Day for Night.
Assayas, on the other hand,
treats the cast, crew, and director of the film-wi thin-a-film as the equiva–
lent of Mike Leigh's dysfunctional family. As in
Secrets and Lies,
we observe
them from the point of view of an outsider, in this case Maggie Cheung,
the siren of Hong Kong cinema, who speaks no French but has come to
appear in her first French movie - one altogether different from the action
flicks that made her an international star.
In a revealing interview, Assayas told me that the presence of Cheung
was the linchpin of his movie - he wrote the script around her. This exot–
ic touch enables him to open up a dialogue with both the French
cinematic past of Feuillade, Godard, and Truffaut and the present-day
commercial cinema of John Woo, Jackie Chan, and Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Assayas himself is every inch the French cinema intellec–
tual, a former editor of
Cahiers du Cinema
with a superb command of film
history and impeccable taste in other people's movies. (It was he who
urged me to see
Breaking the Waves.
I had thoroughly disliked von Trier's
