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A Secret (French: Un secret) is a 2007 French film directed and written by Claude Miller. The screenplay was based on the novel by Philippe Grimbert.

Contains movie and Hardcoded English Subtitles. No menus or extras. Regular DVD quality. Thank you.













Synopsis

Claude Miller directs this engrossing drama about a Jewish boy in post-World War II Paris who stumbles upon a mysterious toy in the attic, exposing his family's secret dark past and how it survived Nazi atrocities. Can the child grasp the devastating truth, or will it drive him deeper into his personal fantasy world? Cécile De France, Julie Depardieu, Ludivine Sagnier, Patrick Bruel and Mathieu Amalric star.



Cast

Cécile De France, Patrick Bruel, Ludivine Sagnier, Julie Depardieu, Mathieu Amalric, Nathalie Boutefeu, Yves Verhoeven, Yves Jacques, Sam Garbarski, Orlando Nicoletti, Valentin Vigourt



A Jewish Family Caught in War’s Ebb and Flow

By A. O. SCOTTSEPT. 4, 2008

Claude Miller’s haunting new movie, based on a novel by Philippe Grimbert, is called “A Secret” (“Un Secret”). But the gist of this story of repression and family tragedy is that secrets are rarely singular. What is hidden from sight and excluded from discussion has a tendency to multiply and expand.



Scrupulously following the path laid down by Mr. Grimbert, a French psychoanalyst who based his book (published in the United States as “Memory”) on his family’s history, Mr. Miller sets out to solve mysteries and clarify ambiguities. Yet even as factual questions are answered, and the basic curiosity of both the audience and the main character is satisfied, “Un Secret” leaves in place a sense that something horribly and splendidly strange can lie under the surface of ordinary experience.



A similar feeling of uncanniness hovers around young François Grimbert (for some reason Mr. Miller has changed Philippe’s name) as he grows up in Paris in the 1950s. Played as a young boy by Valentin Vigourt and as an adolescent by Quentin Dubuis, François is the skinny, sickly son of two marvelously athletic parents. For a while, he dreams up a stronger, fitter, more charismatic older brother to compensate for his own feelings of inadequacy. Only gradually does he learn that such a sibling — a half-brother named Simon, the apple of his father’s eye — really existed.



Simon, then, is the big secret: a double, a precursor and an alternate self for François. But the discovery of this lost brother opens the door for further revelations and deeper enigmas. François knows that his mother and father, Tania (Cécile de France) and Maxime (Patrick Bruel), met sometime around the war, and he imagines their courtship and early marriage as a romantic idyll in the shadow of atrocities nobody much talks about anymore.



Instead, he learns from their friend and neighbor Louise (Julie Depardieu), as she gives him massages and vitamin treatments, that Maxime and Tania and their families were terribly damaged by the terror and bigotry that overran Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.



To describe “A Secret” as a Holocaust movie would be perfectly accurate but also somewhat misleading. Its chronology is complex and elusive. It shifts from the immediate postwar years into the 1980s, when François is played by Mathieu Amalric, and the images are drained of color, and then back into the anxiety and panic of impending and actual war. In those days Maxime spelled his last name Grinberg, he was married to a woman named Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier) and the two of them occupied the stolid center of a large and complicated extended Jewish family.

That family, as it heads toward catastrophe, is as much the setting of the story as its subject, and their fate as Jews under Nazi occupation is entangled in murky, sticky domestic issues of jealousy, betrayal and desire. An erotic spark ignites the first time Maxime and Tania meet — the day of his wedding to Hannah — and it causes plenty of guilt and tension. But it might have been safely (if agonizingly) extinguished in more peaceful times, in which case François would never have been born.



What is most impressive about “A Secret” is the way Mr. Miller artfully and gently gestures toward such enormous themes without spelling them out. Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.



The mood, early and late, is speculative and philosophical, as the adult François calmly and dispassionately reconstructs what he knows of his parents and tactfully guesses at what he doesn’t.



The middle of the film is a perfect novella of confused passion and ethical struggle, a love triangle beautifully acted by Ms. Sagnier, Mr. Bruel and Ms. De France. Ms. Sagnier emphasizes her vivacity over her beauty, playing a modest, spirited woman who knows that she can’t compete with Tania’s toned, golden limbs and regal bearing.



Tania, a former model and an expert diver, seems not only like a perfect match for Maxime, a gymnast and wrestler, but also an embodiment of the Aryan ideal celebrated at the Berlin Olympics. (Mr. Miller’s inclusion of archival clips from those games emphasizes the resemblance.) She and Maxime, who puffs up with French patriotism, seem to be in flight not only from the Nazis and their spouses, but also from the inconvenient fact of their Jewishness.



“A Secret,” based on the writing of their affectionate and loyal son, does not criticize them for this choice. Rather, the film endows them, and everyone around them, with a dense and exquisite humanity, so that their story is freed from the pressure of making a point or teaching a lesson. Instead, terrible decisions and difficult emotions are laid bare, even as the most profound secrets of history and of family life are respected.