Secrets and Lies.

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 lower-class 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.

In Secrets & Lies (when will the ampersands of time run out?), middle-aged cockney Cynthia, who works in a cardboard-box factory, lives rancorously with her daughter Roxanne, approaching 21 and working as a street cleaner. Mother and daughter spend most of their time bickering. Elsewhere in London, Cynthia's younger brother, Maurice, a second-rate portrait photographer, lives with his dourly proper wife, Monica, who has made him cut off his sister despite their closeness. Monica, moreover, will not have children. In yet another part of town, Hortense, a young black optometrist whose foster mother has just died, sets about finding her birth mother. After finally unearthing her phone number, she is hung up on by a hysterical Cynthia, who will have nothing to do with a stranger.

Eventually, though, Cynthia is persuaded, and the women agree to meet at a subway entrance, where for the longest time they don't accost each other, not expecting a member of a different race. When the cat is out of the bag, and Cynthia is hysterical again, they go to a restaurant for tea, and she finally remembers something she had repressed: an affair with a black man. Someone of her racist and xenophobic class could not blot out so big a blot, but without this falsification, there's no plot.

Daughter Roxanne has her own affair with a nondescript construction worker, and we get a chance to watch some of the most unprepossessing sex ever filmed. After much maneuvering, Maurice manages a coming-of-age party for Roxanne, to which Cynthia, who has secretly grown fond of Hortense, talks her into coming along. (Leigh staged this scene without telling others in the cast that Hortense is black: do such tricks really pay off, I wonder?) After the initial shock -- Roxanne even runs out, furious -- Maurice makes a noble speech against the little secrets & lies we allow to poison our lives, and forthwith serenity sets in. In a final scene, we see a backyard threesome -- Cynthia, Roxanne, and Hortense -- lounging and chatting contentedly.

The feelgoodism of it all is hard to stomach, but even lesser things ring false. The return of the previous tenant of Maurice's studio sets off a farcical but unconvincing and unintegrated episode. Similarly, Maurice's hortatory homily, which so impressed most of my colleagues, seems far too feeble to affect even the most impressionable souls. The entire film comes across as haphazard, inconsequential -- in short, improvised.

Brenda Blethyn cries through most of the movie, which should have earned her the Best Crier rather than Best Actress award. Claire Rushbrook, as Roxanne, is worse than unattractive -- emetic. Timothy Spall, as Maurice, is simply boring. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, as Hortense, is fine, but the way the other characters adulate her is phony, and becomes tiresome. Phyllis Logan, as Monica, may be the most believable, but her dark secret turns out to be merely that she can't have children -- what's so guilty about that? And why could no one guess this common fact?

Best in the film are the brief comic scenes in which a cross-section of ludicrous people having their pictures taken by Maurice make asses of themselves. But aside from contradicting Leigh's intent, by making common folks absurd, this is nowhere near enough to redeem a 142-minute movie.

n It is exceedingly hard to make a film about the Troubles in Ireland that would not look and sound like so many other such films, plays, and books. In Michael Collins -- winner in Venice of the Golden Lion, as well as the Best Actor award for Liam Neeson -- Neil Jordan makes a game stab at being different. Collins, who was killed at age 31, is one of the least known heroes of the Irish liberation movement; his name was stripped from Irish history books.

The problem, as Jordan presents it, was that, after organizing the Invisible Army, and devising the bloody but effective anti-British guerrilla campaign, Collins turned into a man of peaceful compromise. It was he who was deputized by Eamon de Valera to negotiate with the English, and the Irish Free State -- a halfway house to the Republic -- came to be. The treaty, which included the partition of Ireland, barely passed in the Irish Parliament, and was rejected by de Valera and his followers, who by then included Harry Boland, formerly Collins's closest friend. Boland was killed by Free State troops. Collins was gunned down when -- heroically or foolishly -- he traveled to Cork to negotiate with the anti-treaty forces.

Much of the story, especially the last part, is conjectural; Jordan also simplified things by, for example, compressing three real persons into the double agent Ned Broy. As for the romantic triangle, it emerges a bit too romantic. Both Collins and Boland were in love with the beautiful Kitty Kiernan, who was getting ready to marry Collins on the very day his small caravan was ambushed, and he himself slain.

I have no idea how much of this is history, how much guesswork, and how much crowd-pleasing embroidery. The romance is standard stuff, though nicely enhanced by Julia Roberts's star presence. Miss Roberts may not be the ideal choice for Kitty, but we must give her credit for taking atypical risks. Aidan Quinn is a personable Harry Boland, and Stephen Rea, as Broy, solid as always. As an English brute sent to bring the Irish to heel, Charles Dance, with that creepily albinoesque face of his, is much better than in his usual leading-man roles. As for Neeson -- of the nose-heavy, asymmetrical countenance and shrewdly darting, soul-searching eyes, he is a lopsided Gary Cooper redivivus -- hardly something to sneeze at.

The frighteningly effective strategy and tactics Collins devised --since copied by the likes of Mao Tse-tung and Yitzhak Shamir -- are bloodcurdlingly conveyed, as is British tyranny. What remains hazy is why the brilliant Collins, in Jordan's version, allowed himself to be such an easy assassin's target.

The real mystery, though, is the character of de Valera. Was he really such a scheming machiavel? Did he send Collins to negotiate in London precisely because he knew that Ireland could not get all it asked for, then turning brutally against him, even colluding in his murder? Or is it just that Alan Rickman plays him? Rickman may well be the smoothest, oiliest, most sinister villain in the Anglophone cinema, down to those unruly English teeth of his. Miscast on occasion in sympathetic roles, he remains untrustworthy: even his voice has a built-in sneer. He turns de Valera into a neurotic, quavery, quaking-with-inner-rage sort of guy -- a memorably unpleasant customer.

Chris Menges's superb cinematography, particularly in the rainy nocturnal -- or rainy diurnal -- shots of Dublin, is as eloquently moody as camera work gets. A large chunk of Dublin has been duplicated by the designer, Anthony Pratt, and is most photogenic when being blown to bits. Yet as impressive as Michael Collins is, it cannot quite climb out from under the fog of deja vu that inevitably hovers over it.