The Secret Laughter of Women

Single mother and landscape gardener Nimi (Nia Long) likes life among the close-knit Nigerian community of Rue Bonaparte, a small coastal town in southern France, but finds herself subjected to a tussle between the 
traditional-minded local womenfolk and her fanciful seven-year-old son Sammy (Fissy Roberts): while the former eye up to the eligible new preacher (Ariyon Bakare) as a potential husband, Sammy hatches similar ambitions for his new friend Matthew (Colin Firth), a successful English fantasy comic-book author who summers from his 'open' modern marriage in a nearby villa. He certainly has a very nice garden.

You probably know this one - the preacher's stern and unlovely, but Matthew is emotionally guarded and immature (Nimi's problem) as well as being an outsider (the rest of the clan's); it takes the film for him to grow and her 
to choose. Though not short on good intensions, as a would-be romantic comedy the unguarded naivety of Peter Schwabach's film doesn't pay off. On the one hand, the attempts to keep the drama light, sunny and sensitive lapse too often into a sense of rose-tinted whimsy or quixotism; on the other, the film sticks too close to too many gernre clichés and can't put them over convincingly. It's more romantic than comic; and more rambling than romantic; and while on the whole the acting is one of the film's stronger suits, there are times when the performers sound like they're reading from the page. The direction and OO Sagay's script provide nice local and cultural colour, but it needs more of a twist.

Nick Bradshaw
© Copyright of TimeOut 1999

NIA LONG ON ...The Secret Laughter Of Women 

"My agent sent me the script for The Secret Laughter of Women and I fell in love with it.  I liked the challenge of playing a woman with a completely different cultural background to mine and having to learn a different accent.  It's difficult as a black American actress to find roles where you're challenged like that.  And I was attracted by the idea of travelling to Europe and doing a film in another country. My character Nimi is a Nigerian single mother living in the South of France.  She's well-educated and artistic and works as a landscape gardener.  She's hired by this comic-book writer Matthew (Colin Firth) to design his garden - and they fall in love.  However, he's a married 
Englishman, while she's influenced by her Nigerian family who want her to marry a Nigerian preacher.   It's not so much about her and Matthew being white and black but about the economic and cultural differences between the 
two characters.  Nimi is torn between what's in her heart and what her family expects of her. 

For the filming I cut my hair off and I had a little Afro to make sure I represented the character properly.  It was a tough, intense shoot, because we had a lot of work in a short period of time.  We had to concentrate a lot on the young boy Sammy who was in many of the scenes.  And I had to master the English accent of a Nigerian woman, which was daunting.  I was scared of the emotional moments in case I didn't sound right.  But Colin Firth was wonderful to work alongside - like a typical Englishman, he tells some very good stories." 

The Secret Laughter of Women 

Fever Pitch's Colin Firth has moved off the terraces to the sun-baked South of France as Matthew Field, writer of a hit comic book series about a hero named Saracen. His secluded, cynical little world opens up when Nigerian 
schoolboy Sammy (Roberts) discovers that Chateau Firth is the spritual home of his swashbuckling hero and starts snooping around after school in the hopes of wriggling his way deeper into the world of action-man Saracen. 

Sammy is part of an immigrant Nigerian community on the Riviera, his mother (Long) being a single parent landscape gardener, trapped in the world of ex-pat women. Her mother Nene is trying to marry her off respectably to the community's priest, Reverend Fola (Bakare) who has an eye for the attractive Nimi, but Sammy thinks it would be a much better plan to get her together with his hero's creator Matthew. He sets up a meeting which results in Nimi reating a garden for the writer. With his marriage cut back to wire, Matthew, in a sort of uptight English way, emotionally struggles to make a bridge across to Nimi and her foreign traditions and grounded African 
womenliness. 

Seceret Laughter is a straightforward man-meets-culturally-different-woman take which fails to properly ignite. Firth seems uneasy throughout, particularly when his catty British wife, played by Caroline Goodall, comes calling. The Nigerian community is depicted in a stereotypically colourful and exuberant way, but we aren't given some essential information - like how and why this virtually all-female community of former British colonials is living in exile in France. This collision of cultures tale chugs along quite pleasantly but ends up going nowhere, despite the lively acting of the almost uniformly excellent Nigerian cast members. 

Predictably cut and emotionally unsure, this is a case of an interesting premise wasted. Bogged down in local colour the British contingent fail to be sufficiently interesting and thus the love story can have no real heart. 

Marianne Gray 

[...] 

Firth's image on screen is often found to be in sharp contrast to his real persona.  Critics have found him self-depracating, over serious and, more than anything, eager to present a side of himself that is little known to
the public arena - a man concerned with social justice.

The real Firth, not the two dimentional emotional void that is Darcy, has in the last year become a champion fighting against the British Immigration and Asylum Bill.  It happened by chance.  He heard the story of a young Nigerian asylum-seeker's treatment at the hands of the British authorities.

Appalled by the refugee's situation, he began to visit and work on behalf of them. "I can't say why his story touched me so deeply, but I'm the one who has been the beneficiary.  I have met so many people who are unbelievably talented."
[...]