One Day You'll Understand.

"Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai doesn't seem to have a career so much these days as a mission," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "It would be difficult for this ambassador of his nation's cinema to break away from Capital-t Topics at this point, but his lugubriousness as a filmmaker indicates that he believes in his own cause as much as his admirers do.... And this one-man film warrior has finally, with his latest, One Day You'll Understand, made his first explicit fictional work of Holocaust remembrance. While its intimacy occasionally brings out some memorable pocket-sized moments, the film is still burdened with Gitai's dry art-cinema tactics and narrative didacticism."

Updated through 11/2.

"Jeanne Moreau's remarkable face has been carrying movies both great and not so much for the past 60 years," writes Adam Nayman in the Voice. "Amos Gitai's latest falls into the second category, though the blame can hardly be placed on its octogenarian star."

"In under 20 minutes of screen time, Jeanne Moreau supplies One Day You'll Understand with an otherwise absent emotional weight of reconciliation to the anguished history of WWII France," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

"One Day You'll Understand contains no great revelations or surprises, but rather is suffused with a quiet glow of sympathy and enlightenment," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Its narrow scope and calm demeanor are signs of its seriousness and integrity."

"As with 2000's Kippur, Gitai invigorates the narrative drawn from Jérôme Clément's autobiographical novel with a tactility that extends to location-shoot barriers (interior walls become featured players) and revelatory ambient sounds," writes Mark Holcomb in Time Out New York. "The effect beautifully underscores the film's thesis that memory is physical in basis and limited as moral compass."

"Compared to Claude Miller's stirring A Secret (Un Secret) last year, Mr Gitai's film is a minimalist treatment of the deadly French collaborationist and anti-Semitic frenzies during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "The casting of 80-year-old Jeanne Moreau, that eternally winsome temptress of cinema, in the role of Rivka, provides much of the raison d'être for the project. It is only the latest manifestation of the deep respect the French cinema has always shown for its aging actresses and actors."

"One Day You'll Understand is as slow-paced as Gitai's films usually are, and the characters are as typically one-dimensional, existing primarily to embody a problem or a point of view," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But the film is also steeped in deep sorrow, and when Moreau breaks down crying on Yom Kippur while trying to explain herself to her grandkids, One Day reaches an emotional level well above Gitai's typical remove."

Update, 11/2: "I don't think One Day You'll Understand is by any stretch Gitai's best work - if you haven't seen his Israeli masterpieces Kadosh and Kippur, start there - but no living filmmaker has his extraordinary formal command of the medium, and he produces half a dozen scenes here that are among the best I've seen in any motion picture all year," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.

Posted by dwhudson at October 31, 2008 10:04 AM