One Day You'll Understand

I was quite excited when I found out that Amos Gitai's One Day You'll Understand was coming to my neighborhood. I like some (but not all) of his films. The theme was about coming to terms with the past (in this case The Holocaust). And the legendery Jeanne Moreau was in it. So how could it miss, right? Well, it did.

The film starts out in Paris in the late 80s. The trial of Klaus Barbie is being telecast. Barbie was responsible for the deaths of so many French Jews during World War II. Rivka (Moreau) is watching and her son Victor (Hippolyte Giradot) is listening in his office. Victor has become obsessed with some documents that he recently found. His father signed papers saying that he and his family were Aryans. But Rivka's parents were killed in the camps. However, she never speaks about it and when Victor asks her about she goes to another subject.

Victor's sister Rivka (Dominique Blanc) says that their father did what everyone else did in order to save his family. She feels that you have to let the past go. But Victor cannot. Victor's wife Francoise (Emannuelle Devos) is worried about him and is trying to cope.

I found the film distant and a bit dry. I wanted more emotion from it. Every scene with Moreau is great but she is in the film for about only 20 minutes (it is 90 minutes long). There is a very good part of the film where Victor and his family go to the hotel where his grandparents hid. In his mind he imagines what happened to them back then.

Giradot did not impress me that much. I found his performance somewhat chilly. And the wonderful Devos didn't have much to do. Gitai was too heavy handed in the telling of the story. I really wanted to like this film and was disappointed. But this is not one of the better films on the Holocaust and memory. But still and all I am glad that I saw it for the wonderful Moreau.