Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:33 pm 
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Memories of the French Jewish experience

This film about a Jewish family that hides some of its most devastating personal Holocaust losses after the end of the Occupation has relative mainstream appeal. As I've noted earlier, Variety predicted "good, but unexciting" prospects for a US release. While the film did relatively well in France (considering the high US market share these days), that means it ranked 20th for box office there.* So far, no US distributor has picked it up.

A Secret/Un Secret tells the story of a boy named Francois (Valentin Vigourt at 7, Quentin Dubois at 14, Matthieu Amalric as a grown man in the 1980's--who now is a therapist who treats shy, withdrawn boys like himself when young). Growing up in the Fifties, Francois has a mother, Tania Grimbert (Cecile de France) who's beautiful and athletic and a great diver, while he's studious and frail and afraid of the water and of strangers. As a seven-year-old Francois is comforted and (literally) massaged and given vitamin shots by Louise (Julie Depardieu), an old friend of the family. Francois is the despair of his father, Maxime Grimbert (Patrick Bruel), who wants him to do gymnastics and be athletic. Maxime has changed his name from Grinberg.

Francois, like many kids, has an imaginary playmate and in this case this phantom companion is a kind of superior doppelganger, a brother who is good at sports, lively, cheerful, outgoing: everything he doesn't seem to be.

In the framing present-time sequences, in black and white, where Francois is Amalric, he meets with Louise and gets a series of revelations about hidden secrets which in part at least he perhaps has by now long suspected. Events a decade before his birth are unveiled, beginning in the early Thirties and leading up to and beyond the War. Amalric's voiceover narrates introductions to these sequences. He learns that his father Maxime had another wife, Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier), a wan and ultimately gloomy individual (she is always seen without makeup, in an unflattering hairdo, smoking) who yet has a robust baby boy, Simon (Orlando Nicoletti). And Simon is the sprightly little gymnast Maxime wanted.

The body of the film is what happens when the War comes and France comes under Nazi occupation. A Secret isn't an extremely complicated story but it is a paradoxical one, with parallels and contrasts that may strain credulity. No doubt its central points are eternally valid: the perversions and horrors of the Holocaust, the need of Jews present in Europe at that time to forget in order to move on. The movie is composed of short scenes that block in personalities, situations, and events schematically. It's particularly heavy-handed in lining up Tania to be Maxime's future mate after Hannah is gone by having him ogling her constantly at all times, when she is married to Robert (Robert Plagnol), who is conveniently taken to Breslau as a soldier early in the war: Maxime is ogling no one but Tania even all during his own wedding. Is this necessary? Hardly, but it does set things up clearly in visual terms, through telegraphic closeups and editing.

All this schematic stuff undoubtedly works well with viewers on a conventional level, and the production values are good, the scenes richly worked out. It's fun to watch the Fifties bathing scene, which introduces the young Francois as a fish out of mainstream water. Cecile de France is lovely to look at; I'm sorry I said she looked "stolid" and "overly athletic": she's just grand. And no doubt Maxime's constant cruising of Tania is indeed meant to be one of the things that undermines the wilted Hannah's morale. It's not certain that Tania is ideally cast. Tania/Cecile is meant to be a "liver" and a winner, as Hannah is not. But all this is telegraphed so blatantly--as is the contrast between Francois and Simon. Could it not have been made a little more subtle?

Nothing can change the power of the devastating moment when Tania and Simon's doom is sealed. It's horrible, it's manipulative (because necessary to the story but not sufficiently motivated), but it's nonetheless memorable. And everything that follows has an emotionality and warmth that the preceding two thirds of the film lacked. The grown up Francois gets a call and rushes him to his aged father, Maxme, who's sitting desolate on a Paris bench after he's let his dog run free on a walk and it's led to the animal's death. Maxime, Francois narrates in voice-over, has recovered from the loss of Simon and Hannah, but he is left inconsolable by the death of his dog. No wonder Francois later has the inspiration of investigating his past and writing about it while visiting a pet cemetary, with his sister, at the aristocratic country house where his father and Tania and Louise were given refuge during the war.

Note: the film is based on an autobiographical novel by Philippe Grimbert.** Some of the French reviews note the difficulty of embodying this powerful work in a film. The reviews are solidly favorable, if few are ecstatic. Once again Miller has done something that's worth watching, but not extraordinary. It's a strong cast, if you accept the workmanlike Gruel in his pivotal role.

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*Source: ScreenDaily.com .
**Available in English. The website of Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris, publisher of Un secret, gives the first two short chapters online. The book received the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, 2004. An American edition appeared this month (Feb. 2008). A Guardian article gives more details of Grimbert's story and the novel. An important event in his life and the novel is omitted from the film.

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


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