Israeli director Amos Gitai can be one of the world's most graceful and effective filmmakers, but he's equally susceptible to ham-fisted episodes, and his new film is one of them.
One Day You'll Understand (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:19
Fresh:12
Rotten:7
Average Rating:6.4/10
Theatrical Release:Oct 31, 2008 Limited
Synopsis:
Paris, 1987. As the trial of Lyon’s Gestapo head Klaus Barbie plays out on television, French
businessman Victor Bastien (Hippolyte Girardot) finds himself distracted from his work...
Paris, 1987. As the trial of Lyon’s Gestapo head Klaus Barbie plays out on television, French
businessman Victor Bastien (Hippolyte Girardot) finds himself distracted from his work and
increasingly obsessed with piecing together the truth about his family’s history. As he sorts
through photographs, letters and memorabilia, the documents he discovers – including an
Aryan declaration written by his father – tell of the fate that befell his parents during the war,
and he is quick to rush to judgment. But to his frustration, his mother Rivka (Jeanne
Moreau) has shuttered away her past and refuses to share any memories with him.
With tensions growing between Victor and his sister Tania (Dominique Blanc) – who
defends their father’s declaration and mother’s silence – his wife (Emmanuelle Devos) and
children accompany him on a visit to the tiny village where Rivka’s parents were forced to
hide during the war. And as Victor finally begins to reconcile himself with his family’s fate,
Rivka makes the decision to confide her past to the members of her family who may have a
chance at shaping the future.--© Kino International
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Dominique Blanc
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Dominique Blanc
Director: Amos Gitai
Director: Amos Gitai
Producer: Serge Moati, Nicole Collet
Story: Dan Franck, Jerome Clement
Composer: Louis Sclavis
Studio: Kino International
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Reviews for One Day You'll Understand
Once again, veteran Israeli director Amos Gitai has made a subtle yet powerful and moving film on an aspect of Jewish experience.
The chance to watch the grand Jeanne Moreau is this flat memoir's saving grace.
[A] counterintuitive, diligently understated exploration of the legacy of anti-Semitism in a mixed-religion, middle-class French family.
Inert performances, an irritating soundtrack, and the lack of resonance of the 'big secret' combine to make viewing a burden.
One Day You'll Understand is not exclusively a picture about the Holocaust. It is about a contradiction: human discomfort with some truths and human hunger for them.
The intelligence and commitment of One Day You'll Understand can't be doubted, but as drama, the film barely registers.
Accurate in imaging the mystery of man's not fully knowable past, 'One Day You'll Understand' leaves too much distant, unsolved and confused.
Despite the back and forth between awkward and moving, unsubtle and touching, Gitai does make a strong case for personal reexaminations of the past.
[Director] Gitai works here from Jérôme Clément’s 2005 book about his mother. He whips something rich and delicate out of the story’s dramatic spareness.
One Day reaches an emotional level well above Gitai's typical remove.
The film is to be seen for Moreau, a French national treasure, who gives a beautiful, understated performance that transcends the derivative story.
...Gitai's penchant for going off on head-scratching tangents is certainly in full force here.
Nonetheless, this mesmerizing, flawed, almost Proustian meditation has more to do with the present than the past.
This is not a movie of big, dramatic revelations; in fact, the notionally elusive truth is pretty obvious from the movie's outset, which makes Victor's quest less about facts and more about principles.
The casting of 80-year-old Jeanne Moreau provides much of the raison d’être for the project. It is only the latest manifestation of the deep respect the French cinema has always shown for its aging actresses and actors.
One Day You'll Understand contains no great revelations or surprises, but rather is suffused with a quiet glow of sympathy and enlightenment.
Drama about a French Jewish family's suffering, secrets, and denials regarding Nazi persecution during the French Occupation is an often disorienting collage of memory shards. But the legendary Jeanne Moreau and other excellent cast help hold interest.
In under 20 minutes of screen time, Jeanne Moreau supplies One Day You'll Understand with an otherwise absent emotional weight of reconciliation to the anguished history of WWII France.
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