2008 (France)
Director: Amos Gitai
Viewed: November 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)
Amos Gitai’s camera tightly frames his characters in his Holocaust-cum-family drama, One Day You’ll Understand. The film flirtis with a claustrophobic atmosphere, yet it remains distractingly distant from the unfolding events. In its slackest moments, Gitai’s style exhibits no feeling other than idle curiosity, a odd flaw given the intensely personal character of the story. That story centers on the prying of Victor (Hippolyte Girardot) into his family’s muddled history, which thrusts together Catholics and Russian Jews in Nazi-occupied France with predictably tragic results. Unfortunately, his elderly mother Rivka (a magisterial Jeanne Moreau, one the film’s bright spots) is reluctant to speak of the past. The film’s primary problem is that in trying to weave together two substantial thematic threads–the veiled character of post-WWII Jewish identity in France, and the challenges of birthrights–Gitai fails to give either a sufficiently rich treatment, and the results feels fumbling and hollow. A late scene, wherein Girardot wanders his mother’s flat as it is dismantled for its valuables, plays as a pale echo of Summer Hours. One Day You’ll Understand lacks the focus, grace, and delight for character and space that made Olivier Assayas’ film an exquisite exploration of a mundane subject.
Yes indeed Andrew, Gitai’s work (I have seen both KADOSH and KIPPUR) is often one-dimensional, particularly in his depiction of religion in Israeli society. I am not surprised at what you say about the film being emotionally distant as to be honest, his films ten to rely on a slow and hypnotizing pace, which are pattern after the French ‘novelle vague’ style. The narrative is usually non-linear, which I assume is also the case with ONE DAY YOU’LL UNDERSTAND.
I bet I would also completely agree with you on the comparsion with Assayas’s SUMMER HOURS, which I thought one of the best films of the year.
Excellent capsule.
The deliberate pace I don’t mind–some of my best friends are slow films, if you follow. But this one just felt flat, and while it wasn’t uninteresting it felt *disinterested*, if that makes sense.