ViewGuide

Created Mar 02, 2013 08:55PM PST • Edited Apr 21, 2020 04:31PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   More a wartime romantic mystery than anything, A Secret is nonetheless as fine a Holocaust picture as you’ll find. Being French, it’s also a sensual love story, or two.

   Let’s start at the beginning even though the movie starts in the middle. A supremely athletic and thoroughly assimilated Jewish guy chafes at the twin restrictions of antisemitism and marriage in the years prior to WWII. The movie centers on the post-war years however, when he and his beautifully athletic wife are raising their incongruously weak son. Key parts of the story are told in flashback by the now grown son, especially about a dark family secret that occurred during the Nazi occupation.

   This multigenerational tableaux provides an apt canvas on which to paint a portrait about the power of sexual attraction, the challenges of parenting a non-idealized child, the temptations of assimilation and the particulars of Nazi-occupied France.

   Plus it’s an exceptionally well crafted and sexy film, full of mysteries slowly revealed, and populated by a physically extraordinary couple who end up with each other only through an irony of Nazi cruelty.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Cécile De France, Patrick Bruel and Ludivine Sagnier make an ideal love triangle, the women falling prey to Bruel’s restless self-absorption. Interestingly for a movie about Jewish identity, only Bruel is Jewish.

   • De France makes the strongest impression as a lithe object of desire, her characteristic role, as for instance the cool lesbian she played in The Spanish Apartment and Russian Dolls.
   • Bruel’s dark intensity makes him credible as a guy who seeks to shed his identity as easily as he dominates in the gym. No wonder he’s huge in France.
   • Sagnier is especially touching as a lovely woman scorned, another great preformance from the actress who later played Uday Hussein’s #1 courtier in The Devil’s Double.

   Their supporting cast is equally strong.

   • Julie Depardieu as a family friend who can’t keep a secret, in part because she harbors a secret love herself. Depardieu? Yes, Gerard’s daughter.
   • Valentin Vigourt, Quentin Dubuis and Mathieu Amalric as a weakling son at ages 7, 14 and 37. Vigourt creates the strongest impression as a little boy unfairly rejected. Amalric is a somewhat familiar face to American audiences from his disappointing appearance in Quantum of Solace.
   • Orlando Nicoletti as a perfect boy who haunts the movie.

   Then there’s the cameo by Philippe Grimbert. Who’s he? The author of the source novel.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Renowned French director Claude Miller made a lifetime of films before doing one near to his own origins as a French Jew. He based A Secret on the autobiography of French author and psychoanalyst Philippe Grimbert. The film hews so close to its origins that the lead character changes his name from Grinberg to the less Semitic Grimbert, no doubt as the author’s family did.

    The film impressively and affectingly begins as the sad story of a slight boy rejected by his macho father, then shifts to something much more thematically and cinematically complex. Bravo.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

12. Play Really Great 4.5

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.3

    The horrors of Holocaust violence are offscreen, though their threat hangs over the proceedings like an invisible fog.

    OTOH, the sexual power exuded by Cécile De France’s model athlete suffuses the movie, leading to a couple of mildly erotic scenes.

    More tenderly, a macho father rejects his weakling son starting at a young age. Soft-hearted viewers might have trouble viewing this.

17. Sex Erotic 2.6

18. Violence Fierce 2.1

19. Rudeness Salty 2.1

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    The tentacles of the Final Solution stretched far and wide, as did casual antisemitism in countries like France. The former isn’t a surprise, though that makes it no less heartbreaking. The latter is an ongoing revelation for we lucky Americans.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0