Like Amos Gitai’s recent feature One Day You’ll Understand (2008), this drama by Gilles Paquet-Brenner dredges up the uncomfortable issue of French complicity in the Holocaust. But the earlier movie benefited from its narrative ambiguity and Gitai’s hypnotic visual style; this one is straight-ahead melodrama, ping-ponging from the present day, when a magazine writer (Kristin Scott Thomas) discovers that her Paris flat was occupied by a Jewish family during World War II, to July 1942, when the family was rounded up by the Vichy government and the parents were sent to their deaths. Because the writer’s curiosity about the family is the only thing leading us into the past, Thomas carries the weight of the movie, and her usual sangfroid works against her; when she finally makes contact with the deported couple’s grandson (Aidan Quinn), the story crumples into sentimentality. In French with subtitles.
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