Beautifully Tragic, but Don’t Pass the Secret On

A Secret, directed by Claude Miller, is a bit like a long train ride in the countryside. It rattles through beautiful landscapes, and rewards the audience with surprising vistas, but the trip itself seems to drag on forever.

Based on Memory, A Novel by Philippe Grimbert, A Secret has the delicate and weighty task of narrating the plight of a French Jewish family during WWII. It also has the challenging mission of transforming the slow, first person narrative of Memory, A Novel into an interesting screenplay. Claude Miller and his co-author Natalie Carter don’t quite succeed—though the book is 160 pages long, the movie feels like three hundred pages of prose. Still, audiences interested in a thought provoking story about the shocking need to choose between a French and a Jewish identity may enjoy A Secret, so long as they have patience.

The scene is Paris, 1953. François Grimbert is a sickly, effeminate seven-year-old boy, reviled by his athletic, pig-headed father, Maxime. Caught up in an imaginary world, François believes he has an athletic and masculine imaginary brother. When François turns fourteen, he uncovers the devastating truth about his parents’ past and the phantom brother of his childhood. His imagined brother was not a ghost, but a premonition of the truth.

A Secret is about a crisis of identity. Exploring the tension between heritage and appearance, the film illuminates the cult of the body prevalent in 1930s Europe—the obsession with physical beauty and aesthetics that preoccupied Germany and Western European bourgeois culture during the era. Maxime’s preoccupation with athletics reveals the common desire among European Jews in the ’30s to, as Miller puts it, “fight against a kind of so-called typically Jewish trait ... to complain, to give up, not to strengthen oneself.” Because Maxime sees himself primarily as an athlete rather than a Jew, he thinks of himself as the embodiment of the Nazi ideal. His willingness to play the Nazi’s game and his inability to embrace his Jewish heritage is stunning and provoking—it asks if one’s pride is more important than one’s life.

The story begins in a bathroom. The camera sits before a mirror blurred with condensation. From a distance, François approaches, and we watch his form clarify from an indistinct shape to a clear gaze of pain. His perplexed gaze in the mirror and the clarification of his form raise the central question of the film—what makes an individual? Is it physical appearance, or what he sees in himself, beneath the surface of the mirror?

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A Secret opens in limited release on September 5.