Un amour à taire (2005) - film review

During the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Lavandiers run a thriving laundry business.  Jean is the favoured son – he works hard and avoids getting into trouble, unlike his brother Jacques who is serving a term in prison for black marketeering.  But Jean has a terrible secret.  He is in a gay relationship with an older man, Philippe.  After years of self-loathing, Jean has finally found happiness, but he knows that if his secret were to be revealed, his family would reject him forever.  Then, one day, a chance meeting with a distressed young woman unsettles his certainties and sets him on a course towards a far greater disaster than he could ever have imagined. 

Introducing herself as Sarah, a childhood friend of his, the woman reveals she is a Jew and implores Jean to help her.  Her entire family has just been killed by the Nazis and she only just managed to escape.  Jean takes Sarah back to the rooms he shares with Philippe and the two men agree to hide her from the Germans.  Philippe provides her with forged identity papers whilst Jean persuades his parents to give her a job in their laundry shop.  Jean’s relationship with Philippe comes under strain when Sarah reveals that she is in love with him.  To complicate matters, once Jacques has been released from prison, he falls for Sarah and becomes jealous when he sees that she has lost her heart to Jean.  Jacques’ animosity towards his brother is increased when he finds out about his homosexuality. 

To punish Jean, Jacques persuades a crooked police chief to have him arrested and detained for one day, not knowing that the police already have a file on Jean in which he is suspected of having an affair with a German officer.  Instead of being released as Jacques had planned it, Jean is held and repeatedly beaten by the police in an attempt to extort a confession from him.  When Jean refuses to give in, he is sent to a transit camp where sadistic Nazis subject homosexual men to a brutal regime in an attempt to cure them.  Meanwhile, Jacques does everything he can to have Jean released.  He bribes the police by giving them the addresses of Jews who have fled so that they can raid their homes and steal their belongings.  He even tries to persuade the police that his brother is not gay, by insisting that Sarah has been made pregnant by Jean.  It is all to no avail.  By now Jean is on his way to a Nazi concentration camp, from which he is unlikely to return...

Originally made for French television (first broadcast in 2005), Un amour à taire has since enjoyed considerable success as a limited theatrical release, better known by its English language title A Love to Hide.  Whilst there have been many film dramas about the Nazi Holocaust over the past decade, this one is virtually unique in that the victims are not Jews but homosexuals, one aspect of the Hitler’s Final Solution which is so often overlooked.  Indeed it was not until 2001 that the French state acknowledged its complicity in the deportation of gays during the Occupation.  

The film was directed by Christian Faure, who already had around a dozen television films under his belt, including another gay-themed drama Juste une question d’amour (2000).  Highly regarded in France for his TV work, Faure has recently broken into cinema with his acclaimed 2008 drama Les Hauts murs and looks set to have a promising film career ahead of him.  Un amour à taire is arguably his best work to date, a film that offers both an authentic recreation of the bleakest period in French history and an intensely compassionate story of love, loss and betrayal.  

Although the film’s solid production values and attention to period detail are impressive from the outset, its failings in the script and acting departments are mildly off-putting at first.  The characters initially appear to be superficial, saddled with an unfortunate tendency of speaking in clichés.  The plot is needlessly contrived and this badly undermines the realism of the drama.  But, around about the midpoint, what began as a fairly mediocre piece suddenly becomes something much more substantial. 

The sight of a sympathetic character being loaded into a cattle wagon by thuggish Nazis has almost become a cliché and yet somehow it still delivers an extraordinary emotional blow.  From this point on, the direction, the scripting and the performances all become (or appear to become) far more nuanced, mature and intelligent.  As you watch the second half of the film, it is impossible not to be totally overwhelmed by its humanity and poignancy.  You are hit by a tsunami of raw emotion, which is all the more powerful because it is so unexpected.

Perhaps the film does veer towards unseemly sentimentality towards the end, but this is probably inevitable given the subject matter and the sheer, almost unimaginable horror of the Nazis’ crimes.  The denouement may be a tad contrived but convincing performances from Jérémie Renier and Charlotte de Turckheim (who play the male lead and his mother to perfection) make it real and devastatingly moving.  It’s a pity that the impact of their last scene is diminished by an over-long and completely unnecessary epilogue. 

Un amour à taire is much more than just another film about the Holocaust.  It is a potent reminder of the consequences of intolerance and the Hell that we can unleash if we allow prejudice and hatred to govern our lives.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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