Books, Arts & Manners: Precarious Prize Winners

PERMIT me to be totally unimpressed by Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, which won the Golden Palm and International Critics’ Prize at Cannes, as well as the Best Actress award for Brenda Blethyn. This is yet another of Leigh’s forays into lowerclass life in London, which the writer-director improvises with his acting company. Critics and audiences accord him raves that I do not begrudge, but cannot begin to endorse.

For one thing, large-scale improvisation strikes me as anti-art, and not only because I seriously doubt the literary capabilities of most actors. Of course if the idea is to replicate ordinary people in an ordinary way, this may be a viable procedure. But I hold with the artist’s transcending rather than transcribing his subject— giving us not a prosaic view, but a poetic vision. A set of lives, certainly, but also, in the language of the index, Life, the meaning of.

JS

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John Simon

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PERMIT me to be totally unimpressed by Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, which won the Golden Palm and International Critics’ Prize at Cannes, as well as the Best Actress award for Brenda Blethyn. This is yet another of Leigh’s forays into lowerclass life in London, which the writer-director improvises with his acting company. Critics and audiences accord him raves that I do not begrudge, but cannot begin to endorse.

For one thing, large-scale improvisation strikes me as anti-art, and not only because I seriously doubt the literary capabilities of most actors. Of course if the idea is to replicate ordinary people in an ordinary way, this may be a viable procedure. But I hold with the artist’s transcending rather than transcribing his subject— giving us not a prosaic view, but a poetic vision. A set of lives, certainly, but also, in the language of the index, Life, the meaning of.