Why Secrets & Lies remains a mas­ter­class in framing

Twen­ty-five years have come and gone since Bren­da Blethyn’s blub­ber­ing matri­arch Cyn­thia and the rest of the Pur­ley fam­i­ly formed the basis of one of Mike Leigh’s best films, 1996’s Secrets & Lies. Plen­ty has been writ­ten about Leigh’s approach to film­mak­ing – a heavy reliance on rehearsal and devel­op­ing his scripts with his cast pri­or to film­ing – but there’s more to Leigh’s work than this method. His skills lie not just with dia­logue, char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion and his under­stand­ing of actors. Aside from the famous two-shot café scene, atten­tion has rarely paid to how the director’s choice of fram­ing accen­tu­ates the core themes of Secrets & Lies.

This is a film about con­nec­tion and iden­ti­ty; the need to know who and what we are; our desire to fit in and how we present our­selves to oth­ers in order to do so. None of the Pur­leys pos­sess the abil­i­ty to con­nect with one anoth­er: they argue con­stant­ly and keep secrets from each oth­er. To illus­trate the dis­com­fort this is caus­ing them, Leigh spends much of the film’s first half con­fin­ing them to uncom­fort­able tight spaces and shots, posi­tion­ing them part­ly con­cealed behind things, with­in cramped stair­ways and corridors.

Even the afflu­ent Mon­i­ca and Mau­rice in their giant sub­ur­ban home feel locked in, some­how rat­tling around the tight­ness of these shots, flanked by the walls of their homes; Leigh often switch­es from a sta­t­ic to hand­held cam­era to crank up the ten­sion. In the sequence of phone calls where Cyn­thia is con­tact­ed by Hort­ense – the biggest truth she’ll face in the entire film – she active­ly hides from the cam­era, turn­ing her back on us. Leigh films her from behind, hunched over, unable to face both the audi­ence and the one secret that’s too big for her to han­dle. As the truth reveals itself, she prac­ti­cal­ly tries to flee the frame.

As the film pro­gress­es and the char­ac­ters come clos­er to fac­ing these hid­den truths, the clos­er the cam­era gets. When Tim­o­thy Spall’s Mau­rice vis­its Cyn­thia after a long hia­tus, it’s no sur­prise that the scene begins with Mau­rice tucked behind an out­house door, with only his eyes vis­i­ble. As he begins to unveil more of his life to Cyn­thia, we see more of him. Then lat­er, as Cyn­thia melts down and flings her arms around him (“Hold me tight, Mau­rice, please!”), Leigh goes in for the clos­est zoom-in on Spall in the entire film. He’s moments away from reveal­ing his infer­til­i­ty to Cyn­thia, but just at that moment the cam­era pulls back again as he changes his mind, push­ing both Cyn­thia and the audi­ence away. The truth is reject­ed. This only adds to our frus­tra­tions at the char­ac­ters’ inabil­i­ty to connect.

It’s easy to draw assump­tions about what Leigh was try­ing to say about British cul­ture and soci­ety in the ​’90s. Even if Secrets & Lies is not exact­ly a point­ed cri­tique of post-Thatch­er Britain, the pol­i­tics of the era still seeps into the film. Above all, how­ev­er, Secrets & Lies is a call to stop con­ceal­ing the truth from each oth­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly our loved ones. (Maurice’s job as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er fur­ther high­lights this – his clients, shown from Maurice’s camera’s point of view in one mem­o­rable scene, all try to present the best pos­si­ble ver­sion of their lives.)

It’s a relief that after rat­tling around these tight spaces for much of the film’s run­time, its final shot is a wide, almost bird’s‑eye view of Cyn­thia, Hort­ense and Rox­anne in the gar­den, on the back of Hortense’s line, ​“Best to tell the truth, I reck­on. That way, nobody gets hurt.” The truth is out – peace at last – so Leigh goes wide. Rows of oth­er Lon­don hous­es are vis­i­ble at the edges of the screen, hous­ing hun­dreds of oth­er fam­i­lies har­bour­ing secrets it would do them a great deal of good to share.