Un secret (2007)

Un secret is a French romantic film drama first released in 2007, directed by Claude Miller.  The film is based on a novel by Philippe Grimbert and stars Cécile De France, Patrick Bruel, Ludivine Sagnier, Julie Depardieu and Mathieu Amalric.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


In the 1950s, seven year old François copes with the trauma of childhood by inventing a brother for himself and imagining a past for his parents.  On his fifteenth birthday, his neighbour Louise takes it upon herself to tell François the secret history of his family.  It is a story which has a profound effect on the withdrawn adolescent, telling the harrowing experiences of his parents, a Jewish couple, during their time in Nazi occupied France...

There was a time when Claude Miller, an apt pupil of the Nouvelle Vague, had a reputation for being one of France’s most inspired filmmakers, someone who had a kanck of turning out consistently interesting films that were characterised both by their psychological depth and their shrewd use of stylisation.  In Miller’s recent films, the psychological part of the equation appears to have been ditched and stylisation used increasingly as a cheap substitute.  We had the first inkling of this in the painfully fragmented Betty Fisher et autres histoires (2001), but worse was to come with La Petite Lili (2003), a clunky revision of Chekhov’s The Seagull.  Stylisation has completely taken over in Miller’s next film, Un secret, a sincerely meant but overly arty adaptation of Philippe Grimbert’s autobiographical novel which recounts the fortunes of a Jewish family during WWII.

On paper, Un secret has much going for it.  Grimbert’s compelling story of love, betrayal and identity during the Nazi Holocaust is virtually director-proof and resists even Miller’s ham-fisted attempts to reduce it to a pretty soap-style saga.  The film has a superlative cast, offering star turns from such talented performers as Cécile De France, Patrick Bruel and Ludivine Sagnier.  The film is attractively shot and skilfully evokes the turmoil and horrors of the past.  With a little more directorial restraint and a little less artistic posturing, Un Secret could have been as powerfully moving as Spielberg’s Schindler's List (1993).

Unfortunately, Miller’s ever-growing penchant for stylisation drains his film of much of its authenticity and impact.  The film’s coherence is weakened by an unnecessarily fragmented elliptical structure which uses flashforward and flashback with gay abandon (and you cannot help wondering what purpose the flashforward serves).  From the perspective of a spectator struggling to make sense of all this It helps that the present-day segments are shot in monochrome whilst those in the past are in sepia-tinted colour, although this feels like a clumsy way of re-introducing clarity into a badly mangled narrative.  Far from adding texture to the film, these self-conscious artistic touches merely heighten its sense of artifice.  The end result is certainly a stylish and evocative piece of cinema, but its full dramatic potential is far from realised.

© James Travers 2010

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