Un secret

This is a complex, moving and beautifully realised film by Miller. The themes of rejection, love, loss and guilt are explored in a complex narrative structure where ultimately the guilt of one man and the rejection felt by one woman are mirrored in the guilt of the French nation in their rejection and abandonment of their Jewish fellow countrymen.

Lush cinematography, precise mise en scene and excellent performances including Ludivine Sagnier cast against type as the object of non-desire make for a totally satisfying cinematic experience. Perhaps we could have done without the coda in Laval's pet cemetery but by that stage I and the rest of the audience were emotionally drained. Go see.

One of the big achievements of Un Secret which must be noted is that the director, Claude Miller, doesn't entirely sympathize with his characters or make them out to be all completely good Jews. They're not. This is a film concerning the holocaust that doesn't just make a blanket statement like "Nazis = Bad". No, there were Jews who were in denial, and tried to cloud over the horrible fact that was upon all of Europe, and indeed it's when the film takes its most dissecting view at the flaws of these characters that the veneer is stripped away of completely innocent people being swept up in the maelstrom. While Miller obviously acknowledges and shows the horror of anti-semitism in France (one brief scene in a classroom showing Night and Fog is especially startling) and of the rise of Hitler, he puts his eye on the Grinberg family and what really happened between François Grimbert's parents (name changed when he was a kid) before and during World War 2.

Miller's approach with Un Secret is a tricky one structurally, and it doesn't quite find it's footing until a third of the way into the film. He tries to find a back-and-forth-and-back form of dealing with three periods of time: 1930s, 1950s/1960s and 1985 when everybody is older and it turns to black and white (an opposite touch that works, for a moment), and it's only effective in about the first five minutes. I became wary of those sudden jumps to the 1985 portion of the film, where we see an old Maxime Nathan Grinberg (Patrick Bruel) grieving over the loss of his dog and his son trying to find him, and found it didn't strike anywhere near as well as the 50s scenes. On top of this, after all of the film has ended, that huge chunk of the film with the focus on that first marriage of Grinberg's with Hannah and his very obvious but eventually-acted-on infatuation with Tania (very sexy Cecile de France) was far more effective dramatically and tonally than anything else in the film.

This is not to say Un Secret doesn't cast a very fascinating look into this particular boy's lack of perspective and of his father's determination to compete on a physical level with the Germans, to almost "be" one in a perfectionist sense athletically, and how this one secret is part of scarred memory, attachment to one's faith and religion and who they are, and love and lust. The cast is generally excellent, with Bruel, De France and Sagnier delivering work with nuance and exquisite, painful emotions that resonate from one into the next scene (Sagnier is so good she gets us to feel repulsed, or at least taken completely aback, by what she does while in hiding). And the moods of joy and despair in a Jewish family circa 1930s and 1940s- and the subsequent self-imposed shame of people in Europe even after the war ended- is captured with some real power and accuracy.

But Miller also can't completely fix together his narrative; he feels the need to jump around as if it will create a really intriguing rhythm, where if he stepped back and told it without sudden jumps or surreal bits like the "brother" in the boy's bedroom at night the film would benefit. There is also a lack of a real resolution; the 1985 scene just didn't cut it for me as far as an unspoken father/son thing, and despite it sounding conventional a confrontation of the boy to his parents might have brought something more interesting than the uneven subtlety of the ending. A lot of this is so hearth-breaking in its true dimensions and probing of the subject that the only real disappointment is how it doesn't fell... complete with itself.

All François knew was that his father wasn't overly fond of him. Part of it may have been because he wasn't as athletic as his parents. His father would get upset when he talked of an imaginary "brother."

No one talked of the family secret until he was 14 and Louise (Julie Depardieu) decided he should know. She tells him of life during WWII, and his father's first wife, and his son. Unbeknownst to him, they were all Jews, even though his father never practiced his faith. During the war they escaped France. All except his wife (Ludivine Sagnier) and son. She decided to demonstrate her independence at the wrong time. Of course, she was also upset that her husband (Patrick Bruel) couldn't keep his eyes off her brother's wife (Cécile De France). Who could?

What happened didn't become known until François (Mathieu Amalric) was older. We, the audience knew what was going to happen, but the Jews at the time had no clue. Julie Depardieu really excelled in this engrossing tale. Cécile De France was also very good. It was a brilliant work of art.

Having read the comments on this site, after having heard a friend (whose opinions aren't always reliable) say I must see it, I expected a marginally good picture when I rented the DVD. OK, I thought, another personal story about French and German anti-Semitism in WW II. This time my friend was right! A Secret was a knockout. It hit home and revived childhood memories. And it's as much or more about pre-WW II & post-WW II as it is about during. I won't repeat what others have rightly said about the uniformly excellent acting or the directing or the photography, etc. Among the things that hit home to me were the child's (or children's) point of view--SO on target--and the very different types of Jews portrayed in this film. Even though I "knew" (intuited) what would happen to some characters, what actually did happen was better than my imaginings. Its reference to the big illusion (La grande illusion) was apt (as well as the one character who actually saw it). More than one illusion is shattered by this pic, which like my friend I highly recommend.

Claude Miller is a director I have been much interested in in the past, and the sufferings of those targeted by Nazis during the war can't fail to affect me, but this film dealing with a Jewish family before, during and after the war somehow does not grip me as it should. I can't fault the actors, they are all good, and Cécile de France is inspired, but the endless flashbacks and flash-forwards tried my patience greatly. When I have to ask myself who this character is who is hurling angry words at another character, I lose patience with the story. Some pruning of plot and characters would have benefited the film.

Miller also made L'Accompagnatrice, again a war story, which suffered from many of the same faults. I think he is best at contemporary stories like Betty Fisher et autres histoires and Garde à vue, when he can work with the actors without having to recreate an historical context.