A Secret

This film is a great example of the art of finesse in story telling that the French bring to film making. The story focuses on François, a Jewish boy who is born at the end of World War II, but the film is really about secrets and the power they have over time and generations of a family. The film's title implies that there is one, but as is almost always the case, one secret begets further secrets and there is no end in sight. This is a great movie in support of open discussion, working problems out in the light of day. It convincingly demonstrates the ripple effect that secrets have, engulfing more people and more lives as the ripple travels outward. What we keep hidden from view is not gone, and in fact gains power in the process.

So the smaller story is that François is the weakling only child of two robust athletes, and the misery this makes of his life. His father is daily disappointed by his lack of physical prowess, and he has almost no interest in François' intellectual talents. We see François as a small child, a teen, and as an adult (who has grown into himself, emerging from his childhood as a psychiatrist)--the story, and the back story which impacts it are all told in an interwoven manner, flashback, flash forward, and so it begins to slowly unwind. Through a neighbor and family friend, François learns a much more troubling story. It is a story of a previous sibling, one that his father had with another wife. It is a tale of attraction and jealousy, one of the oldest stories on the planet, but this one is superimposed on an occupied France and a tight knit Jewish community. The plan is for all of them to escape together, but that solves only one problem. The safety problem. Not the unspoken jealousy piece--all the players would now be living together. So one of them makes a choice that changes their lives irrevocably. And becomes the next secret.