Clevercell Very disappointing...

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

lastliberal 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.

MisterWhiplash 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.

writers_reign This is certainly head and shoulders above Miller's last movie, La Petite Lili, in which he thought he was better than Chekhov and generally stank up the screen. Apparently this is also an adaptation, this time of a modern novel which I haven't read so I don't take it so personally. Another - and better - French director, Louis Malle, also had a crack at Chekhov but Vanya On 42nd Street was content to just film the original text rather than rewrite it. Here, with the help of a mainly fine cast, Patrick Bruehl, Mathieu Almaric, Cecile de France, Julie Depardieu, he tackles a multi-generational tale that begins in the mid thirties with a Holocaust waiting in the wings and ends in the eighties with resolution of a sort. Cecile de France makes an effortless transformation from her usual ingenue to a mature woman but Miller erred in casting Ludo Sagnier and expecting her to act with her clothes on (her naked love scenes in Lili had been central to the wrecking of Chekhov). It has art house written all over it, of course, but it no worse for that. If slow, ponderous, unravelling is your thing you could do far worse than this and my only caveat is that Mathieu Almaric is not given enough to do.

Kelli West I didn't know exactly what to expect when I went to see this film, so I arrived with an open mind. Upon leaving, I was pleasantly surprised by how this film had reached in and grabbed me, leaving me thinking about it for the rest of the evening. The film revolves around François, and takes place over a number of decades, starting in the 1950's and fast-forwarding at certain parts to the 1980's. François in the 1950's is a young boy, a bit shy, who doesn't seem to meet the expectations of his gymnast father, Maxime, here played by French singer/actor Patrick Bruel. We can see that the relationship between François and Maxime is strained, and we can sense that even the relationship between Maxime and Tania (François' mother, played by the superb Cecile de France) is not exactly "normal." François, an only child, has an imaginary friend, or should I say an "imaginary brother." This brother is stronger, faster, better than François, and leaves François frequently daydreaming about him. This leads us to the "secret" which the film title hints at. At this point we know that things in general aren't "right", that something has happened that François doesn't know about, but feels. Finally, at the age of 15, a kindly neighbor who has known Maxime and Tania for many years, lets François in on the "secret" and we go back in time 20 years. In the mid 1930's, Maxime has married a beautiful young woman named Hannah and has a big, spectacular Jewish wedding. At this point, Hannah introduces Maxime to her brother Robert and Robert's wife Tania. Life is good and Hannah and Maxime have a son, Simon. Over the 5 or 6 years that follow, World War II unravels and France slowly becomes occupied. French Jew's start wearing the Star of David on their clothing, but Maxime refuses to wear one. This causes an uproar in the family as he is accused of denying his Jewish faith. Both Robert and Maxime are sent away to fight in the war, and whereas Maxime makes it back, Robert is still stuck at war. Not to give away the climax of the film, I will briefly summarize the next part. Maxime and part of his family decide to obtain false papers and head to unoccupied France, with the intention of the rest of the family (Hannah, Simon, etc) later... I will not give away the rest of what happens next. It is at this point in the film that François (at age 15) understands the importance of the famous family "secret" and begins to understand his life, why his parents are how they are, why he is even alive. The flash-forwarding to the 1980's at different points in the film show us a grown François, and an even older Maxime and Tania. They give us a better understanding of the characters, a more complete aspect of the whole story. As I mentioned, the film is incredibly touching. The film is shrouded in a profound sadness that can be felt from the beginning, but for just cause. It is not until François learns this secret that he can even begin to understand his existence. Overall great acting. I have not read the book, and as books are usually better than the movie, I cannot make a comparison. But I do believe an honest effort was made to bring the story to life. I definitely recommend this film.