A Secret.

"Based on the roman à clef by Philippe Grimbert, a French-Jewish psychoanalyst whose parents committed suicide when he was young, Claude Miller's World War II domestic drama is unusually attentive to the way that the Holocaust disrupted lives that were messy enough to begin with," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "A Secret suggests that it's not illicit passion, but rather the crime of denial, that has screwed up this family down the generations."

But in Slant, Andrew Schenker finds "its smooth narrative progression - which neatly glosses over the screenplay's several moral ambiguities - and complete lack of emotional resonance threaten to reduce the events of WWII to the stuff of César-baiting kitsch (made all the more disturbing by Miller's questionable decision to use actual footage recorded at death camps)."

Updated through 9/8.

"A Secret takes the tired approach of a child viewing history through the quirks of his family, which worked only slightly better in last year's Blame It on Fidel," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "For its emphasis on family affairs, A Secret doesn't quite qualify as Blame It on Hitler, but it flirts with the idea of historic tragedies as the easiest narrative exit strategy in a story where the narrator is rather clueless."

"The film's non-chronological jumble of flashbacks - François as a teenager, François as a child, François's parents before he was born, and the brief, black-and-white interludes of François as an adult to which the film keeps circling back - makes A Secret more jumbled than it needs to be," writes Darrell Hartman in the New York Sun. "At times, the film, which opens Friday at IFC Center, feels like an incomplete adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Philippe Grimbert on which it is based, a fussy trimming of the book's layered narrative, rather than a true distillation of it. But Mr Miller's film is powerful enough both to overcome these structural flaws and to dull any quibbles about the familiarity of the context."

"The actors project effortless star power, particularly de France, more radiant than ever as the athletic Tania, but it's Ludivine Sagnier who provides A Secret's tortured core," writes Elisabeth Vincentelli in Time Out New York.

"I recommend A Secret to everyone who can still feel shame over a world's failure to stop the slaughter," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Purists of this particular genre may argue that the physical presentation of the major characters is too robust for the subject, and the women, particularly, are too photogenic and erotic. But that, of course, is precisely the point. Even the most tangential treatment can serve to stir and outrage our memories anew amid the perhaps forlorn hope that future generations will treat the Holocaust as a secular sacrament."

"As A Secret ends, it cues treacly piano music over a montage of the Names of the Dead," notes Henry Stewart in the L Magazine. "If no more genuine an elicitor of emotion than a television studio's applause sign is necessary for Miller to make the slaughter of millions seem meaningful, consider the dead insulted."

Earlier: James Van Maanen.

Updates, 9/5: "What is most impressive about A Secret is the way Mr Miller artfully and gently gestures toward such enormous themes without spelling them out," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film's climactic disclosures."

"A clanking, old-fashioned period drama infused with almost unbearable grief, Claude Miller's film A Secret has an enormous significance in France that it can never possess elsewhere," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Is it time to move on? Sure it is; France, Europe and the world are immeasurably different places today. But as citizens of a nation that keeps refighting the Civil War at least once per generation ought to know, the past never stops mattering."

"[M]ore often than not, A Secret is suitably tense, sad, and deeply poignant as it moves toward an epilogue exploring the idea that everything rots and decays, no matter how well-maintained," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "The movie sums itself up well with a framing image of a young boy gazing at himself in a dirty mirror, trying to take his own measure through the muck."

Update, 9/8: "[Y]ou shouldn't miss it," Lawrence Levi tells New Yorkers at Nextbook. He explains, and then: "As for Grimbert's fictionalized mother, Tania, a statuesque model and swimming champion who perches on diving boards with heart-stopping elegance: Not even Leni Riefenstahl could have made her look better."

Posted by dwhudson at September 4, 2008 6:44 AM