One Day You'll Understand

First of all, who would/could resist a movie starring Jeanne Moreau? All our lives, those eyes have enchanted us (Les Amants, Liaisons Dangereuses, Quatre Cent Coups, La Notte, Jules et Jim, Diary of a Chambermaid, M. Klein, La Femme Nikita) and here she is, now 81 and 134 movies later, still alive and kicking. One Day You'll Understand, a cinematic adaptation of French author, Jérôme Clément’s autobiographical homage to his mother, deals with the near impossibility of children ever recuperating the irrecoverable past of their parents, let along coming to terms with it. In this movie (just called Plus Tard in France), Jérôme Clément’s maternal grandparents, Vichy France, Klaus Barbie and the Holocaust are the irrecuperable past. Clément’s paternal family were French Catholics; his mother's were Russian Jews.

Situated at the centre of this intelligent meditation, Jeanne Moreau, knowing what fate visited upon her, knowing what barbarities were visited upon her parents, has composed a fiction of her past, having never shared past truths with either her children (and now her grandchildren). The trial of Klaus Barbie, butcher of Lyon, provokes her change. None has an escape from their past. On Yom Kippur, she takes her grandchildren to synagogue. Later, you'll understand, she reassures her son.

Because I'm in the process of reading The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, by Israeli Avraham Burg, j'accuse Holocaust representations have been much on my mind. After screening Shoah in 1985, Claude Lanzman's eight-plus hours of interviewee memory (which ran 8 h 20 min.) I felt then as I feel now: I understand everything I will ever understand about cinematic representation of the Holocaust. And yet Holocaust indictment entertainment keeps spewing forth. Last holiday season, we got a spate of them, : I Served the King of England, Waltz With Bashir, Defiance, Adam Resurrected, Valkyrie, The Reader (I'm supposed to feel for an Auschwitz guard?), Counterfeiters. They provoke in me such guilt, sentimentality, sorrow, anger. They also strike me critic-immune, the most unctuous, claiming moral high ground and the mantle of all that is good and righteous to fend off cinematic mediocrity. Some (La Vita e Bella) are egregiously mawkish. Many pile it on with gratuitous violence.

Among critics, (Jewish, for the most part), there's a lot of Holocaust crankiness out there. Enough already. One wrote:the more bad Holocaust films you make, the more Holocaust clichés you employ, the more the Holocaust itself becomes a cliché. One Catskills wit cracked: There's No Business Like Shoah Business. IMDB lists 461 titles in the holocaust subset. There are even unseemly Top Ten Holocaust/Nazi movies lists. Here's my problem: exploiting unfathomable mass horror in the hopes of either making a buck or earning some gravitas recognition seems mighty unseemly.

In One Day You'll Understand, Israeli Director Amos Gitai seeks a dialog between past and future, between unknowable collective memory (Moreau) and uncomprehending present-day France, haunted by its past (Hippolyte Girardot). With the imminent disappearance off the stage of the last direct witnesses to the horrors (gone, as though they never existed). Buried secrets, Amos Gitai argues, must be entrusted to the artists: filmmakers, novelists, painters. His observations are astute, restrained, interior, contained.