A Holocaust movie unlike any other
Let me describe the first two scenes, and in fact the first two shots, of Israeli director Amos Gitai's new film "One Day You'll Understand." They should be shown to aspiring filmmakers, under the heading of "this is how much you have to learn." In the first shot, a 40ish man in a suit (it's the French actor Hippolyte Girardot) crosses a busy street in Paris and approaches some kind of large horizontal stone monument, evidently rather new. He appears to be looking for a particular name or names on the monument, but there is no dialogue or explanation.
In the next sequence, again filmed (as far as I can see) in a single shot, we see an older woman puttering about her apartment. (It's Jeanne Moreau, arguably the greatest of all French actresses.) She's cooking but grows distracted and looks out the window. Returning to the stove, she finds she has burned a pot of beans, scalds her hand on the pot and mutters about it. She has the radio on, and it's broadcasting early testimony in the trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer who was convicted of war crimes in a 1987 trial in Lyon. Although she shows no reaction, she is clearly listening.
It's a remarkable introduction to a remarkable film. Without a single word of dialogue, Gitai has already told us a good deal about the story and its setting, placing a web of inferences and associations throughout these disconnected and apparently ambiguous scenes. If it's 1987, Moreau's character is the right age to have experienced the Nazi occupation of France, and perhaps the events for which Barbie is being tried. (He was personally responsible for the deaths of at least 4,000 people, both those he ordered executed in France and those he sent to the camps.) Girardot's character is clearly too young for that, but the monument he's inspecting looks very much like a Shoah memorial. We understand right away that there's some personal connection between these people, and also a connection between them and the Holocaust.
In fact, the connection is already almost obvious: Victor (Girardot) is trying to find out as much as he can about his Jewish grandparents, who died in the Holocaust. His mother, Rivka (Moreau), who married a Catholic before the war and had both Victor and his sister Tania (Dominique Blanc) baptized, has almost never spoken about them. This is indeed another film about the unsealing of a European family's half-buried secrets, and its plot bears some superficial similarities to that of Claude Miller's recent French hit "A Secret." But it's a very different kind of movie. With his ultra-long takes, naturalistic scenes of ordinary life, and rigorous, almost architectural approach to filmmaking (as every critic is bound to observe, he holds an architecture Ph.D. from the University of California), Gitai is not a director likely to produce a conventional melodrama....
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In the next sequence, again filmed (as far as I can see) in a single shot, we see an older woman puttering about her apartment. (It's Jeanne Moreau, arguably the greatest of all French actresses.) She's cooking but grows distracted and looks out the window. Returning to the stove, she finds she has burned a pot of beans, scalds her hand on the pot and mutters about it. She has the radio on, and it's broadcasting early testimony in the trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer who was convicted of war crimes in a 1987 trial in Lyon. Although she shows no reaction, she is clearly listening.
It's a remarkable introduction to a remarkable film. Without a single word of dialogue, Gitai has already told us a good deal about the story and its setting, placing a web of inferences and associations throughout these disconnected and apparently ambiguous scenes. If it's 1987, Moreau's character is the right age to have experienced the Nazi occupation of France, and perhaps the events for which Barbie is being tried. (He was personally responsible for the deaths of at least 4,000 people, both those he ordered executed in France and those he sent to the camps.) Girardot's character is clearly too young for that, but the monument he's inspecting looks very much like a Shoah memorial. We understand right away that there's some personal connection between these people, and also a connection between them and the Holocaust.
In fact, the connection is already almost obvious: Victor (Girardot) is trying to find out as much as he can about his Jewish grandparents, who died in the Holocaust. His mother, Rivka (Moreau), who married a Catholic before the war and had both Victor and his sister Tania (Dominique Blanc) baptized, has almost never spoken about them. This is indeed another film about the unsealing of a European family's half-buried secrets, and its plot bears some superficial similarities to that of Claude Miller's recent French hit "A Secret." But it's a very different kind of movie. With his ultra-long takes, naturalistic scenes of ordinary life, and rigorous, almost architectural approach to filmmaking (as every critic is bound to observe, he holds an architecture Ph.D. from the University of California), Gitai is not a director likely to produce a conventional melodrama....