GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Bob Taylor Claude Miller is a director I have been much interested in in the past, and the sufferings of those targeted by Nazis during the war can't fail to affect me, but this film dealing with a Jewish family before, during and after the war somehow does not grip me as it should. I can't fault the actors, they are all good, and Cécile de France is inspired, but the endless flashbacks and flash-forwards tried my patience greatly. When I have to ask myself who this character is who is hurling angry words at another character, I lose patience with the story. Some pruning of plot and characters would have benefited the film.Miller also made L'Accompagnatrice, again a war story, which suffered from many of the same faults. I think he is best at contemporary stories like Betty Fisher et autres histoires and Garde à vue, when he can work with the actors without having to recreate an historical context.

Aristides-2 Though the story told is autobiographical, and tragic, you don't have to care much at all for a couple of the main characters. I found two reasons to loath this movie: 1. The first wife, Tania, so deeply disturbed when she learns of her husband Maxime's attraction to her sister-in-law Hannah, violates her deepest maternal instincts, i.e. to protect her young son Simon, by masochistically revealing herself to be a Jew to the Vichy police (they subsequently perish in an extermination camp).....and only a mile away from safety! Grotesque human behavior by all three of these adults makes them impossible to relate to. 2. Casting anomalies: Jumping back and forth over decades the actors cast look the same age most, if not all of the time. Which confuses the viewer repeatedly about chronology. ( I suppose in the case of the too-old-to- begin-with Patrick Bruel (Maxime), the director just accepted this reality while looking at dailies by rationalizing, "If the audience is going to get hung up over his looking too old then they're not really into the story!" Oh yeah director Miller: Bruel was too old looking in 1937 and looking exactly the same....too old.....twenty years later!) Overall conclusion: This movie reduced the horror of the French-Jewish experience of the Holocaust to a sordid love triangle. Yuch!

antcol8 What's the difference between a film and a movie? Or is there one? Well, some works are definitely both...Hitchcock, Sirk...but, what's my point? Oh, yeah...this is a MOVIE. Like, well maybe I've seen too much Ozu or something, but I think ONE glance from Patrick towards Cecile ON HIS WEDDING DAY would've really made the point - would've made the point a lot better than it was made. From that moment on, I was in danger of checking out. If I ever see this film again, I promise to count how many times he checks HER out in that one poor sequence. It's at least 20 times - ridiculous.I don't like having my cinephilia insulted in this way. And the Kitsch of it is, from that moment on, we are launched into some kind of weird Freudian/Lacanian scenario where The Return of the Repressed meets The Primal Scene. Every time we see Tania's taut buttocks in that clingy bathing suit that covers her va-va-voom body, every time we are thrown back into that most Portnoy-ish of Selfhating Wet Dreams, where the Blond Shiksa is a Full-Blooded Jewess, we both can't wait for Mommy to die so that we can be together with the Babe, and we hate ourselves for feeling like this. Guilt - yummy! It takes away the feeling of prurience and lays "high seriousness" on top of it - one of the classic Kitsch layer cakes. So why the Seven rating? Because if you leave out the fact that Miller really doesn't trust his viewers to think for themselves, there is something powerful in this film, the way it links Frenchness and Holocaust Denial, the way it shows how Jewishness is such a complex construction which conflates Race, Religion and Culture. But careful which films you quote if you're not on their level: Grand Illusion is name-checked, bits of Night and Fog are shown, and isn't the Bal Musette after the Klezmer Wedding (a really nice musical transition, by the way) shot at the same hall as the the famous Lesbian Dance in The Conformist? It sure looks like it. Pardon My French, but Vive La Difference!

Turfseer Saw this film at Lincoln Center with the director, Claude Miller, in attendance. During a question and answer session he stated that he's always asked the same question at these sessions--that is, why did he use color for the scenes in the past and an off gray for the scenes that are supposed to take place in the present (the present being 1985, the time when the story is narrated by the main character). Miller replied that he simply needed a way to distinguish between the past and the present. Personally I was uneasy with the director's decision to reverse the traditional use of color to connote the past; others may feel differently. A Secret is told in a series of flashbacks that cover three time periods. The narrator is the grown up son telling the story of his family in 1985. At the beginning the elderly father has disappeared after the family dog is killed by a car. The son recalls his difficult childhood in 1955; the father expected him to be a vigorous athlete but as a child he's sickly. Then we flash back further to learn that the father was married to another woman during the time when the Nazis occupied France. The first son wins awards as a child athlete and the father is very proud of him. Slowly a family secret is revealed--the man's father and his family were originally Jewish. The father escapes to a rural area away from the Nazi occupation. The mother and son are expected to join him but ends up revealing her Jewish identity to gendarmes just before she is about to cross the border into the non- occupied area of France. The first wife is jealous of his brother's wife (who is now the mother of the narrator son in the later scenes). The first wife learns earlier on that her husband has been having an affair with the sister-in-law; she no longer feels she can join her husband since she believes he's no longer in love with her. The first wife is willing to sacrifice herself and her son out of either anger of depression (or both). All this is supposedly based on a true family story. The most compelling part of the film are the scenes in the early 40s where the Jewish families must deal with the gradual erosion of their liberties, discrimination against them and eventual arrest and deportation by the French authorities who are acting in concert with the Germans. The extent of the collaboration of the French populace is not glossed over and Miller does an excellent job in creating the atmosphere of those times. It's a cautionary tale about the dangers of Fascism.The other part of the film, the family drama, simply isn't as compelling. Once the 'secret' is revealed, one realizes that it's not much of a secret at all. There were a fair number of Jews who had to convert to Christianity in order to save themselves during the war and their deep fears of being singled out by Fascists in the future kept them from converting back, even long after the war. The big hook here is of course the decision of the first wife not to join the husband. Her reasons are never explored and we're left to speculate what caused her to allow herself and her son to be arrested. The first wife's decision is supposed to be deeply shocking but the revelation doesn't feel like the twist ending the director was hoping for.The very fact that we never really find out what the first wife's motives were is unsatisfying (at the same time one can easily speculate that she became unhinged out of jealousy). One wonders how the narrator son (who later ironically becomes a child psychologist treating autistic children) ends up so well adjusted given his traumatic childhood. It's unclear what happens to the mother--at a certain point, the narrator indicates the father left her after she suffers a stroke (when this happens is also unclear). When all is said and done, A Secret is a mixed bag but worthwhile seeing to gain some insight concerning the Holocaust.