A Secret

Un Secret

Director
Claude Miller
Cast
Cécile de France (Tania), Patrick Bruel (Maxime), Ludivine Sagnier (Hannah), Julie Depardieu (Louise), Mathieu Amalric (François à 37 ans), Quentin Dubuis (François à 14 ans), Valentin Vigourt (François à 7 ans)
Date
2007
Duration
100 Minutes

In stark contrast to his parents, the champion swimmer Tania (Cécile de France) and athlete Maxime (Patrick Bruel), François is a bookish, introverted boy who lives through imagination.  However, his vision of how his parents met is smeared by stories from a family friend, revealing their hidden Jewish past and experiences during the Second World War.

Miller’s film expertly jumps through different periods of a family’s personal story, which opens out onto a larger historical context.  Like Malle or Truffaut, Miller skillfully portrays childhood experience in testing times, as he has done so consistently in previous work (La Meilleure façon de marcher, La Classe de neige).

Wonderfully acted, shot and scored (by Kieslowski collaborator Zbigniew Preisner), Un Secret enjoyed great success with the French public.