Diffuse holocaust drama

Claude Miller is often a disappointing director but this one seemed promising. After all, it stars Cecile de France (given top billing), Ludivine Sagnier and Matthieu Amalric (his role, as the protagonist later in life, largely without dialogue). Sagnier is suitably sad as a Jewish girl doomed to watch her husband secretly eye the luminous Cecile from her wedding day on. (Its surprising to see Sagnier so pathetic and homely after he buoyant, downright cute star turn in Chabrol's new one, The Girl Cut in Two.) Overall Un secret seems a misfired effort; even Cecile is made to look stolid, her hair unattractive, her body overly athletic. And the story, whose revelations ought to have been heart-stopping and mind-blowing, simply stumbles along and then fizzles out.

The film's French critical reception has been average at best. Le Monde's critic Thomas Sotinel wrote of it: "The real mystery of this film is in its submission to the most outdated conventions of historical reconstruction, its inability to give flesh and life to a story that that one can feel palpitating there, right at hand." This is, unfortunately, exactly right. Un secret muddles its way through what could have been an intriguing and heartbreaking tale. Better writing surely might have made it more involving. In the treatment by Miller and Natalie Carter, based on the novel by Philippe Grimbert, the action is going in too many directions, with no one thread really compelling. There's the spindly boy, son of Cecile de France (herself much seen, one isn't quite sure why, in diving and swimming scenes)--who has an imaginary brother who's good at all the things (chiefly gymnastics) that his father wants him to excel at. He grows up to be Matthieu Amalric, a psychologist dealing with timid, shut-down boys. Eventually he has learned about the family enigma involving Auschwitz and the two women.

So we have a story about French Jews in the Nazi occupation (sketchily depicted); another story about a man with two successive wives and two sons; and an overlapping--but also sketchily realized--story about a boy haunted by a family secret that's been hidden from him. The reason? Guilt--a Jewish enough emotion to be a good starting point for the while film (but it's not; the feeling only emerges later).

Probably the really interesting theme here, in fact, would have been how Jews who made it through WWII but not without horrible losses, would start new lives and try to delete their earlier ones, because they're too painful to recall. But as suggested, this would require better writing--and a different structure to develop. An opening title announces that this is all based on real events and people. Miller's rambling, pedestrian treatment of these intriguing events however drains them of a lot of their excitement. (I am only repeating what the Le Monde critic says, but I wrote this before I read his review.)

Obviously Un secret is a film of slow revelation--or ought to be. One might think of the unfolding of facts about the last days of Mr. Watanabe in Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, Ikiru. Well, that's perhaps an unfair example. When has Claude Miller ever done anything that would qualify him to so much as wipe the dust off the shoes of the great Kurosawa?

Un secret opened in Paris October 3, 2007. According to Variety it "shared the Grand Prix of the Americas prize at the Montreal Fest with Belgian debut feature 'Ben X,'" so chances of US distribution seem good, if unexciting. Seen in Paris October 15, 2007.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.