Un secret (2007)

Director:

Claude Miller

Writers:

Philippe Grimbert (novel)
Claude Miller (writer)

Release Date:

3 October 2007 (France)

Genre:

Drama | War

Plot:

A 15-year-old boy unearths a shocking family secret. |

Plot Keywords:

Family Secret | Secret | World War II Bomber | Imaginary Person | Nightmare

Awards:

2 wins & 10 nominations

Cast

Cécile De France	...	Tania Stirn / Grimbert
Patrick Bruel	...	Maxime Nathan Grinberg / Grimbert
Ludivine Sagnier	...	Hannah Golda Stirn / Grinberg
Julie Depardieu	...	Louise
Mathieu Amalric	...	François Grimbert à 37 ans
Nathalie Boutefeu	...	Esther
Yves Verhoeven	...	Guillaume
Yves Jacques	...	Le commandant Béraud
Sam Garbarski	...	Joseph
Orlando Nicoletti	...	Simon Grinberg à 7 ans
Valentin Vigourt	...	François Grimbert à 7 ans
Quentin Dubuis	...	François Grimbert à 14 ans
Myriam Fuks	...	La mère d'Hannah
Robert Plagnol	...	Robert Stirn
Michel Israel	...	Le père d'Hannah

Also Known As:

A Secret (International: English title) (festival title) (USA) (new title)

Runtime:

Argentina:105 min

Country:

France

Language:

French | Yiddish | German | Hebrew

Color:

Black and White | Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital | DTS

Certification:

Switzerland:10 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:10 (canton of Vaud) | Argentina:13 | Philippines:R-13 (MTRCB) | Australia:M

Filming Locations:

Baraize, Indre, France

Company:

Canal+

Trivia:

Eva Green was considered for the role of Tania and Pascal Elbé for the role of Maxime

Movie Connections:

References La grande illusion (1937)

Soundtrack:

Les Valseuses

not everything works, but when it does it's some riveting, tragic stuff

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.