This riveting documentary perfectly complements the Corn Hall’s latest Art Exhibition

Posted on 21st September 2022

 

Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories, a documentary made by her son Nick Willing, was never going to be the usual detached academic dissection of a painter and their work, but neither is this a tiresome hagiography. The relationship between director and subject is actually a key component in this extraordinary analysis of Paula Rego’s work.

What we get to see is exactly what it says on the tin – the secrets and stories of a life that is both fearless yet fragile, funny yet tragic, humorous yet loving. What becomes abundantly clear is that if you want to understand Paula Rego’s work, her life is a good place to start. With a mix of frank interview and heritage footage, Willing focuses on Rego’s early childhood, her life at the Slade, her pregnancy, her marriage, her affairs and ultimately her widowhood. We get to hear about a repressive, middle class Portuguese life in which women were encouraged to do nothing, while working class women were forced to do everything. This was a time of learning obedience to men, when attendance at London’s Slade School of Fine Art was an escape as much as an education, and her affair with highly regarded (and married) painter Victor Willing proved both formative and life changing.

Secrets and Stories is a film that focuses on relationships rather than fame, with Willing as gentle inquisitor, probing a mother that was both secretive and distant in an effort to tease out who Paula Rego actually was. How far he succeeds in that endeavour is for the viewer to decide, but the attempt is both riveting and enlightening in equal measure.