Word: blethyn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...women, who have just met, sit side by side in a drab London cafe near a tube station. The younger woman, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), has told the older, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), that she is her daughter, given up for adoption 28 years ago. Cynthia curdles in disbelief, for she is white, Hortense black. "I don't mean nothin' by it, darlin'," Cynthia protests in her tiny voice, "but I ain't never been with a black man in my life." She stares into the void, and then a chill comes over her stricken face--you can almost...
...scene, from the film Secrets & Lies, is a vintage Mike Leigh moment--a whirl of comedy and soap opera, of bruising tenderness and bravura acting, with the immediacy of real life heightened into the craft of movie art. As Blethyn lets the waterworks flow, Leigh's camera holds on her and Jean-Baptiste for nearly eight purging minutes. Blethyn's heroic work won her the Best Actress prize this year at the Cannes Film Festival. And Secrets & Lies was named Best Film at Cannes. This week it opens the New York Film Festival and will have its premiere in other...
...characters scrupulously and generously. Cynthia, a factory worker, has another daughter, balky Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), "with a face like a slapped arse," and a younger brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), whom she raised but to whom she has not spoken in two years. "Cynthia's really very capable," notes Blethyn, "although not the brightest." So when Hortense shows up, it is a shock and an opportunity. Secrets will be revealed, and lies made truth, at Roxanne's 21st-birthday party, held by Maurice and his stressful wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). Catharsis is achieved a mite speedily, but the family has earned...
Secrets & Lies is rich in humor, pained or frolicking. Blethyn's Cynthia is an especially voluptuous creation, with her carelessly dyed hair and mincing steps, her metallic, baby-doll voice that calls everyone darlin' or sweetie, her habit of puddling into tears as her life spins out of control...
...sets that fill the RSC's small stage and position the actors mere feet, if not inches, from the audience as they portray over-the-top derangement. All are good, and the two nuttiest -- Gary Whitaker, as the youth who comes to believe he is an alien, and Brenda Blethyn, as the neglected wife who regresses into toddlerhood -- rip open psychic dungeons to unleash dragons of despair...