ON THE face of it, few things would seem to be as mutually exclusive as the Cannes Film Festival and the movies of Mike Leigh. The festival is a glittering, self indulgent hymn to that side of cinema that comes unmistakably under the heading of hype. Leigh's films are tightly disciplined, frequently grim observations of the human condition in which the watchword is absolute truth.
For another thing, it is a generally assumed cliche that the sun always shines in Cannes, although in point of fact my first appointment with Leigh on one of the resort's private beaches had to be cancelled because of the weather (a freak wave had swept Trainspotting star Ewen McGregor off his feet at a Channel 4 lunch on the same beach the previous day).
Still, by the time we did meet, it was a sunny morning, it was the South of France and we were at the seaside three elements not usually associated with the work of someone whom a colleague recently called "the poet of bleak days and rain sodden gloom.
Let's clear that one up for starters the sun shines a lot in Leigh's new film, Secrets & Lies, which, a few days after our appointment had been hastily rearranged for a shady hotel garden, won the Paline d'Or, the world's second most famous movie prize. In so doing, it confirmed the improbable love affair between Leigh and Cannes which began three years ago when Naked (which is rain sodden and gloomy) won him the also ran prize of Best Director.
The love affair, it turns out, is a two way thing. "If anyone finds it difficult to reconcile my subject matter with my enthusiasm for the razzmatazz of Cannes," says Leigh with much the same combination of aggression and chirpiness that characterises Secrets & Lies, "then they are naive and take a very narrow view of things. Apart from anything else, the dinners are good."
The subject of food always a theme in Leigh's films and, by all accounts, a major interest in the director's own life leads him off onto a wistful detour, regretting the absence from Cannes of Timothy Spall, detained in Britain by illness. The Falstaffian actor is a feature of Leigh's films, having been in four of them, most notably as the enthusiastic but gastronomically challenged restaurant owner, Aubrey, in Love Is Sweet.
Aubrey's inedible menu which featured such delicacies as "Black Pudding and Camembert Soup" and "Liver in Lager" was obviously something of an in joke at Spall's expense, since food is one of his hobbies, too, "We're very disappointed he's not here," says Leigh, "because he would have cut a very fine dash indeed. Apart from anything else, as a confirmed gastronome, he would have had a good time."
Whether or not anyone had a good time in Secrets & Lies is hard to say. "All of us went through hell in making this film," is Leigh's own explanation, "and we enjoyed every minute of it. Like all his films, it evolved, not from deep within the director's creative psyche, but by a process of what he calls "conspiring" with his actors a protracted rehearsal period in which the characters and the story evolve. This does not, it should be emphasised, mean the films are improvised by the time shooting starts, everything is fixed and written down.
THIS time, what evolves is not so much a gallery of immensely likable grotesques the kind to be found in High Hopes or Life Is Sweet, as flawed human beings struggling to let their strengths win out over their weaknesses.
"Tim and I share a healthy taste for the grotesque," admits Leigh. We're both avid Dickensians, and he's really good at all that. But he's also a sensitive and emotional guy, and he's really pared away and got down to that here in a very special way. He's managed to create a good guy who doesn't make you feel sick with sentimentality."
The celebration of goodness without accompanying nausea has been a theme of Leigh's films since his first feature, Bleak Moments, in 1971. And nowhere does he achieve it more fully than in Secrets & Lies, which tells the story of Hortense, a young black optometrist (Marianne Jean Baptiste), adopted at birth, who sets out to find her real mother. This takes her into the compromise ridden world of Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, who won Best Actress at Cannes), her daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), her photographer brother Maurice (Spall) and his wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan).
Hortense all but blows this world apart. But the crisis she provokes brings with it an affirmation of the values that the family, in attempting to avoid any number of issues, have disastrously repressed. Where Naked slammed door after door in the face of human warmth and togetherness, Secrets & Lies prises those same doors open again. Although it is often just as painful, it is much funnier and far more life affirming.
"Naked, as a matter of fact, was quite a hard act to follow," says Leigh ruefully. "You make a film where you scrape away to the rock bottom of things and then you have to make another one! And one always lives under the threat or the possibility that you are just making the same film over and over again. That's a problem for anybody who does anything that you always tell the same story. And, in a certain sense, it would be true of what I do.
"But, having said that, I'm quite comfortable about returning to the general subject matter which I have always done, which is relationships and people and family and all of that."
THE brightness of the new film belies all the warnings I have quietly been given in the days before the interview about the director's current state of mind. "Not a happy man," muttered one associate on the telephone a couple of days previously a reference to the fact that Leigh had just split up with his wife of 22 years, actor Alison Steadman, who appears in almost all of his films (most unforgettably as the title character in Abigail's Party). True to form, she puts in a cameo appearance, along with the family dog, in Secrets & Lies.
Perhaps it is because he senses the triumph that is to come, but Leigh does not appear at all an unhappy man as he scurries across the gravel in front of the hotel. In order to do so, he has to dodge O photographers who, oblivious to his presence, are looking for Christopher Lambert.
With his Palme d'Or picked up eight days later, Leigh became both more famous and, just as importantly, more bankable than Lambert. He also, in Cannes terms, easily topped Naked, becoming only the fifth British director to win the Palme d'Or, and the first to do so in 10 years (other winners are Carol Reed for The Third Man in 1949, Lindsay Anderson for If. .. in 1969, Alan Bridges for The Hireling in 1973 and Roland Joffe for The fission in 1986).
"Part of what I do as a filmmaker," says the director, "is to be an entrepreneur. That is what it is about putting entertainment on for people. So far as what has happened over the past few years at Cannes is concerned, I regard it as entirely a good thing. I made films in total obscurity for many, many years. I never dreamed that one would go to Cannes, let alone win a couple of prizes as Naked did, let alone have the experience that we are having here with this one.
"As a film maker who began life as a film student in the early Sixties," he concludes, "being far more inspired and involved with international cinema than with English language cinema, it seems entirely natural and very good news indeed to finally become part of that international cinema. I never thought it would happen, but it's brilliant that it has, and I have absolutely no reservations about it."