‘A Secret’: Never Safe

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The New York Sun

“A Secret,” the French director Claude Miller’s new film, opens with a mesmerizing little scene set in the summer of 1955. A skinny, squinting boy (Valentin Vigourt) trails his mother, Tania (Cécile de France), across the lawn of a posh country club outside Paris. A goddess in a white bathing cap, she slices toward the pool through the crowd of bronzed bodies. She climbs the ladder up to the diving board, and as he watches her from below, she dives, as easily and elegantly as she might let down her hair.

This childhood memory in the mind of François Grimbert (Mathieu Amalric) sums up the sense of awe and distance he has often felt toward his parents. They are a handsome couple, we see in repeated flashbacks, but not a particularly happy one, and young François’s physical weakness is a constant source of disappointment to his gym-obsessed father, Maxime (Patrick Bruel). Only when he is a teenager does François learn, from a relative (Julie Depardieu), that his parents are survivors of the Holocaust, and that their union only came about because another family was torn apart.

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