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

"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."  
 

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  
creating 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."
[...]