Un Secret

This is one of those films that feels much longer than it is. Part of the problem is the tortuously complicated use of different time frames. Once the main flashback gets under way it's a gripping watch, but the build up involves jumping between the 1950s, 1960s, present day and an idealised child's-eye view of his parents' experience of the war. All of this can actually be justified as spaces reverberate with different meanings across the decades (the swimming pool, the shop, the courtyard) but it makes for an unwieldy structure. Having said that, the film does have an impressive emotional impact. The sickly young boy who always disappoints his athletic father imagines an elder brother who is everythig he isn't. Poignantly it turns out such a brother existed but that part of the family history has been kept a secret by everyone for reasons that are never quite clear. It could be guilt for a not-quite adulterous relationship during the war which caused the breakdown of the first wife and led, in a shocking moment, to her condemning both herself and the much-loved son to the death camps. The terrible irony is that nothing had actually happened. It's only the subsequent terrible grief that finally throws the couple into each other's arms. Likewise it's only the two women travelling with the wife and child who witness her betrayal of the boy to the police and who decide to keep this from everybody else. The real war experienced by his parents is totally different from that idyllic courtship imagined by the protagonist, and it reverberates for decades afterwards.