MEAN TIME

“Hard Truths.”

- JUSTIN CHANG

We first met Hortense Cumberbatch, the soft-spoken optome trist at the heart of Mike Leigh’s wonderful 1996 film, “Secrets & Lies,” at a funeral. The camera paid her little mind. Dwarfed by a crowd of mourners in a cemetery, her head bowed as she murmured along to “How Great Thou Art,” Hortense, played with crystalline restraint by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, didn’t give much indication of being a main character. It’s possible that Jean-Baptiste, a Black British stage actor and musician with only a handful of small film roles to her name, didn’t know it yet herself. One of the curious effects of Leigh’s famously unorthodox working methods—in which the shape of a story and the nature of its characters are discovered, and perfected, through an often months-long process of acting workshops and rehearsals—is that the performers themselves seldom know beforehand whether they’re playing a lead or a supporting role.

Michele Austin and Marianne Jean-Baptiste star in Mike Leigh’s film.

Leigh’s approach, dogged in its pursuit of emotional truth, is meant to frustrate such narrative hierarchies to begin with. His dramas, among them the TV movie “Meantime” (1983) and cinematic features such as “Naked” (1993), “TopsyTurvy” (1999), and “Vera Drake” (2004), remind us that no one is a supporting player in their own life—a truth made especially plain in “Secrets & Lies,” which is predicated on shock revelations and hidden identities. Hortense, having lost both her adoptive parents, set out to track down her biological mother—only to learn that she had been born to a white woman, Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn). As years’ worth of disclosures and recriminations erupted into the open, the serene Jean-Baptiste held us close and rapt. At the climax, amid a flood of family histrionics, our eyes sought out Hortense, sitting on the sidelines, stricken with remorseful silence.