Alesia White
Extra Credit
Prof. Franklin
Alesia.White@usm.edu
4 November 2009

Secrets and Lies

The movie starts with us witnessing a Funeral. There is a young woman, Hortence Cumberbatch, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste at the funeral that the camera focuses on, she is crying. The funeral is for the young woman’s adoptive mother. The death of her adoptive mother and her father a few years earlier made Hortence want to find her biological mother, so she decided to go through the ordeal to start the search. Hortence is a successful black woman. On the other side of the social class there is a woman, Cynthia Rose Purley, played by Brenda Blethyn; in which Hortence Cumberbatch traces her birth mother back to this lower-class white woman and she denies it. Cynthia works at a factory and is emotionally unstable, bitter and drinks and smokes heavily. Her twenty year old daughter, Roxanne, played by Claire Rushbrook, lives with her in a rundown house. The two have a strained relationship, they don’t really talk to one another. Roxanne is the product of her mother, she is mean and unhappy. Cynthia has a brother, Maurice, who she use to be very close to. Her brother has a successful photographer’s business and is married to a woman who dislikes his sister very much. Maurice lives close to his sister, in a more upper class area, but they hardly see one another. Even though him and his wife has been in the house for a year, Cynthia and her daughter has never been invited over. So, all round, Cynthia feels rather lonely and isolated. Emotions run high as everyone's secrets are exposed.

This is a lovely, small film with beautiful performances by Brenda Blethyn and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. It is filled with comical moments that balance out some of the heavier parts of the film. My heart went out to the two lead characters as they struggled to make sense of the