Boring

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Claude Miller wrote & directed this excellent drama about a family in France From the 1930's to more recent times.It is based on Philippe Grimbert biographical novel about his family & the decisions some members had to make during the war in order to survive.Some say it is a holocaust tale, They do mention & we see fleeting images of that tragic event. This is a sometimes funny, sometimes sad & also tragic as well. ALL these elements are part of life, & we have them all in this 100 minute movie. It is done in a flashback style using various color patterns(including black & white, to cover the period depicted. It can be a bit confusing BUT when you pay close attention everything becomes clear.This is also about wonderful people,the sort of persons we all would like to have known, we may very well know some people like those portrayed in this fine film.Since this is a French film,most of the cast may not be known to us,They ALL do an excellent job. Everything in this film is very well done.It was released in the US in Nov. 2008 & played till early March 2009. BUT only in a very small handful of theatres.This is the type of film that should have played in many theatres all over. It is that good a drama.I feel it would appeal to all types of families.Rent this, you will not be sorry, You may even want to purchase it.Ratings; **** (out of 4) 97 points (out of 100) IMDb 10 (out of 10)

All François knew was that his father wasn't overly fond of him. Part of it may have been because he wasn't as athletic as his parents. His father would get upset when he talked of an imaginary "brother." No one talked of the family secret until he was 14 and Louise (Julie Depardieu) decided he should know.She tells him of life during WWII, and his father's first wife, and his son. Unbeknownst to him, they were all Jews, even though his father never practiced his faith. During the war they escaped France. All except his wife (Ludivine Sagnier) and son. She decided to demonstrate her independence at the wrong time. Of course, she was also upset that her husband (Patrick Bruel) couldn't keep his eyes off her brother's wife (Cécile De France). Who could? What happened didn't become known until François (Mathieu Amalric) was older. We, the audience knew what was going to happen, but the Jews at the time had no clue.Julie Depardieu really excelled in this engrossing tale. Cécile De France was also very good. It was a brilliant work of art.

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.

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 (according to ScreenDaily.com). 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.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 has perhaps 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 voice-over 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. This is how his survivor guilt reemerges. No wonder Francois later has the inspiration of investigating his past and writing about it while visiting a pet cemetery, 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 a 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.