This is certainly head and shoulders above Miller's last movie, La Petite Lili, in which he thought he was better than Chekhov and generally stank up the screen. Apparently this is also an adaptation, this time of a modern novel which I haven't read so I don't take it so personally. Another - and better - French director, Louis Malle, also had a crack at Chekhov but Vanya On 42nd Street was content to just film the original text rather than rewrite it. Here, with the help of a mainly fine cast, Patrick Bruehl, Mathieu Almaric, Cecile de France, Julie Depardieu, he tackles a multi-generational tale that begins in the mid thirties with a Holocaust waiting in the wings and ends in the eighties with resolution of a sort. Cecile de France makes an effortless transformation from her usual ingenue to a mature woman but Miller erred in casting Ludo Sagnier and expecting her to act with her clothes on (her naked love scenes in Lili had been central to the wrecking of Chekhov). It has art house written all over it, of course, but it no worse for that. If slow, ponderous, unravelling is your thing you could do far worse than this and my only caveat is that Mathieu Almaric is not given enough to do.
Review of A Secret
