Un secret

Director Claude Miller ('The Little Thief')has gone and crafted a fine, taut,heartbreaking tale of repression,tragedy & truth,leading to closure. 'A Secret',adapted from the novel of the same name by author Phiiippe Grimbert,concerns a man,Francois,who as a young boy,had the feeling that he had an older brother. When he couldn't get a straight answer from his tight lipped family,he goes on a search for the truth & gets more than he bargained for. The film boasts of a fine cast,including Julie Depardieu,daughter of actor Gerard Depardieu,and the always welcome Ludivine Sagnier (Swimming Pool). The story's pace may be a bit slow for most Western viewers,but waiting it out will be well worth it,for the final solution. The film's visual look is a treat for the eye (with the present day sequences filmed in black & white, and the scenes that take place in the past which were filmed in colour,which may remind some viewers of 'Les Violins Du Bal'). Films like this deserve far better than they get (unlike any & all of the latest cine crapola that feature Pauly Shore or Adam Sandler). No rating,but contains nudity,sexual situations & some gruesome images of concentration camps that would be disturbing to youngsters under 15.

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.

"Un Secret" (2007) is a challenging family drama - mystery which takes place in at least five different time periods, but mostly in the past and around the German occupation of France in the WWII years. It dexterously handles multiple time jumps, and keeps your attention, but loses momentum somewhere along the way. It does have a first-rate cast: Cécile de France certainly looks the part of an athlete (a swimmer / diver, to be specific) -> you can see why Patrick Bruel would, with a guilty conscience, consider her to be an upgrade compared to a deliberately dowdy Ludivine Sagnier. **1/2 out of 4.

Since the structure of the movie, works with many flashbacks, there is not a big surprise in the end. The acting is more than decent (even I recognize many french actors and I'm not really familiar with most of them) and the story deserves to be told. Although I'm not sure, if it really is based on a true story, it's still a gripping story ... unfortunately, this movie does underscore many things. And while sometimes it might work out to underplay a few things, it doesn't work in the favor of the movie ...

I watched it with another person and he kind of despised the movie. He thought the theme was nice, but was unhappy with the handling of that subject matter. I do agree with him to some degree, but I think it would be unfair to the actors and the (overall) story to give it a lesser rating ...