Claude Miller is one of the finest of modern French directors, and this film is one of his best. As many others have said before me, 'Un Secret' ('A Secret') verges on perfection in every way. The direction, the actors, the novel, the script, are all superb. The film is based upon a best-selling novel by Philippe Grimbert, which tells what is apparently a true story, of a revelation about what really happened in wartime, as experienced by a son who has never been told the truth. The story takes places at various times and has flashbacks and flash-forwards. The savage oppression of the Vichy Regime in France is here shown in all its fascist relentlessness: French policemen picking up French citizens to send them off to be gassed in Germany! Children too! And thereby hangs the tale: the 'imaginary brother' whom the lead character used to play with in his imagination when he was a child is someone he later discovers really existed, and really was his older brother so that it must have been a psychic impression. But the older brother was sent off to his death, with his mother, and a conspiracy of silence about the true events became a family tradition. The stately and athletic figure of the ironically named Cecile de France (ironical because she was born not in France but in Belgium) wafts through this film continually, and to call her redolent with vibrant beauty and possessor of a kind of 'ideal Aryan woman' quality would be an understatement. She positively exudes allure, in the way that some fruit trees drip sap. Ludivine Sagnier, who used to be a child actress, but has long since matured successfully, does an incredibly sensitive job of portraying the intangible hysteria and willfulness of a young Jewish woman who makes a false decision at a moment of crisis during the War, at a point when she has become irrationally defiant and slightly unhinged. This is a perfectly judged film, which must have meant a lot to the director (who wrote the script himself), and everyone involved seems to have contributed his or her best to bring this tragic tale to life in an unforgettable manner.

Having read the comments on this site, after having heard a friend (whose opinions aren't always reliable) say I must see it, I expected a marginally good picture when I rented the DVD. OK, I thought, another personal story about French and German anti-Semitism in WW II. This time my friend was right! A Secret was a knockout. It hit home and revived childhood memories. And it's as much or more about pre-WW II & post-WW II as it is about during. I won't repeat what others have rightly said about the uniformly excellent acting or the directing or the photography, etc. Among the things that hit home to me were the child's (or children's) point of view--SO on target--and the very different types of Jews portrayed in this film. Even though I "knew" (intuited) what would happen to some characters, what actually did happen was better than my imaginings. Its reference to the big illusion (La grande illusion) was apt (as well as the one character who actually saw it). More than one illusion is shattered by this pic, which like my friend I highly recommend.

All François knew was that his father wasn't overly fond of him. Part of it may have been because he wasn't as athletic as his parents. His father would get upset when he talked of an imaginary "brother." No one talked of the family secret until he was 14 and Louise (Julie Depardieu) decided he should know.She tells him of life during WWII, and his father's first wife, and his son. Unbeknownst to him, they were all Jews, even though his father never practiced his faith. During the war they escaped France. All except his wife (Ludivine Sagnier) and son. She decided to demonstrate her independence at the wrong time. Of course, she was also upset that her husband (Patrick Bruel) couldn't keep his eyes off her brother's wife (Cécile De France). Who could? What happened didn't become known until François (Mathieu Amalric) was older. We, the audience knew what was going to happen, but the Jews at the time had no clue.Julie Depardieu really excelled in this engrossing tale. Cécile De France was also very good. It was a brilliant work of art.

This is certainly head and shoulders above Miller's last movie, La Petite Lili, in which he thought he was better than Chekhov and generally stank up the screen. Apparently this is also an adaptation, this time of a modern novel which I haven't read so I don't take it so personally. Another - and better - French director, Louis Malle, also had a crack at Chekhov but Vanya On 42nd Street was content to just film the original text rather than rewrite it. Here, with the help of a mainly fine cast, Patrick Bruehl, Mathieu Almaric, Cecile de France, Julie Depardieu, he tackles a multi-generational tale that begins in the mid thirties with a Holocaust waiting in the wings and ends in the eighties with resolution of a sort. Cecile de France makes an effortless transformation from her usual ingenue to a mature woman but Miller erred in casting Ludo Sagnier and expecting her to act with her clothes on (her naked love scenes in Lili had been central to the wrecking of Chekhov). It has art house written all over it, of course, but it no worse for that. If slow, ponderous, unravelling is your thing you could do far worse than this and my only caveat is that Mathieu Almaric is not given enough to do.