For its first half hour, the hauntingly elegant “One Day You’ll Understand” unfolds like an inviting mystery about a missing chapter in a French family’s history.
Triggered, perhaps, by the trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (aka the “Butcher of Lyon”) all over the radio and TV — the film takes place in 1987 — a middle-age government functionary (Hippolyte Girardot) obsessively pores over documents and notebooks trying to trace the thread of his Jewish grandparents during World War II.
Victor could certainly ask his mother, Rivka (a riveting Jeanne Moreau), about his family history — and he does so over dinner at her apartment. But she smoothly deflects his inquiry with small talk, leaving Victor to pierce the veil of secrecy on his own. His persistence, and Rivka’s refined soulfulness, pull us steadily closer.
Exquisitely directed by Amos Gitai and sensitively acted, “One Day You’ll Understand” is an unexpected and welcome slant on the Holocaust in France
Looking at three generations of an average Parisian family touched by the past in ways they can’t quite grasp or escape, this quiet drama views history and memory as a responsibility one chooses rather than as a burden one shudders beneath.
The film opens Friday, Feb. 27 on two Bay Area screens, one in San Francisco and one in Berkeley, for what will likely be a one-week run. Don’t delay.
“One Day You’ll Understand” — a seemingly pretentious title that the film repays beyond our expectations — makes use of Gitai’s signature long takes, with the camera diligently tracking the characters back and forth in their comfortable apartments. It works beautifully in mimicking the natural flow, and awkwardness, of everyday life while creating a kind of claustrophobia.
Yet this is easily the prominent Israeli director’s most accessible and satisfying film in years, perhaps because it isn’t an original screenplay but was adapted by Gitai, Dan Franck and Marie-Jose Sanselme from Jérome Clément’s autobiography.
Gitai has always emphasized his characters’ reactions to acute circumstances rather than the innate drama of plot developments, purposely denying viewers a sense of completion or catharsis. But this film closes with a surge of quiet devastation that leaves us stunned and a little out of breath.
Although Gitai, who earned a Ph.D. in architecture from U.C. Berkeley some 30 years ago, has lived in Paris for many years, he almost always sets and shoots his movies in Israel. “One Day You’ll Understand” unfolds in a Paris of warm abodes, gentle light and soft voices, where a sense of community and affinity still remains.
Or perhaps it’s as fragile and illusory as the amity extinguished by the Nazi invasion of France, which led neighbors to denounce Jews. The movie does serve, subtly and briefly, as an indictment of both collaborators and the French governments that abetted the Nazis and subsequently refused to acknowledge responsibility for decades.
But the film’s central concern is personal. Rivka’s husband wasn’t Jewish, a detail that afforded her protection during the occupation but was of no benefit to her parents. Victor, it turns out, was raised Catholic with no sense of Jewish identity.
It is a crucial irony that he is suddenly driven at this point in his life to unearth the truth about his latent Jewish identity. It is also ironic, and richly powerful, that Rivka entrusts Victor’s non-Jewish children with her secret, and her legacy.
“One Day You’ll Understand” opens Friday, Feb. 27, at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley.