Memory’s burden

Amos Gitai on One Day You’ll Understand,
his ambiguous story of the legacy of the
occupation of France

TROUBLED BY THE TRUTH: Girardot

by MARK SLUTSKY

The almost incomprehensible burden of the past, especially when that past includes forced deportations to concentration camps, is the subject of Amos Gitai’s One Day You’ll Understand (Plus tard, tu comprendras). It’s a return to France, where the Israeli director, son of Bauhaus architect Munio Weinraub (and a trained architect himself), was once based, and the story he’s telling here is particularly French, based on the autobiography of Jérôme Clément.

Set mostly in the late 1980s, during the divisive trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo officer known as the “Butcher of Lyons,” One Day You’ll Understand focuses on the emotional journey of Victor (Hippolyte Girardot), a 40-something Jewish executive obsessed with the fate of his grandparents after he discovers his grandfather signed a declaration claiming Aryan ethnicity, which he sees as a troubling betrayal. He doesn’t get the help he wants from his mother (Jeanne Moreau), who, like many of her generation is loathe to revisit the past.

With scenes structured like miniature emotional set pieces composed of Gitai’s trademark long tracking shots, this is a thoughtful and anguished film that holds out only the faintest hope of resolution, despite its title. “For the horrible story of the Holocaust, there is no mercy,” says Gitai, speaking to the Mirror at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. “It will resonate a long time in human history. So it’s not going to be resolved. A terrible scar. The film doesn’t try to resolve it, either.”

Despite that, the film is set at an important moment in modern French history, a time of coming to terms with the realities of the occupation. “But it took a long time,” says Gitai. “Let’s not forget that the Barbie trial, which is the way the film starts, took place in 1987. So it took the French more than 40 years, after the end of the Second World War in 1945, to put to trial the head of the Gestapo in Lyons. That’s a very long time. And it took them even longer to finally recognize that the French state was implicated. Neither de Gaulle nor Mitterand accepted this issue; it was only Jacques Chirac, who in the late ’90s finally accepted the involvement of Marshal Pétain, but also the French administration, in assisting the Nazis in deporting Jews and liquidating them.”

On a smaller scale, the film seems to be saying, that process of dealing with the past is no simpler. “The film is dealing with something that for me was really the centre of the project, what the French call the non-dit,” Gitai says. “What will not be said. When I set out to make the film everybody rightfully told me that cinema is about what should be said, or what can be said. But I wanted it really to remain about what will not be said.

“I think that in a question of transmission between parents and children, there are some things that will not be said. The parents will never speak about their intimacies with their kids. And also when it comes to more nightmarish experiences, they will try to save the details from their kids. So when we speak about memory and transmission and so on, we always have a big kitschy over-simplified vision of the parents sitting next to a fireplace, with kids just sitting there enjoying every word. I don’t think it works like that.”

ONE DAY YOU’LL UNDERSTAND
OPENS THIS FRIDAY, MAY 22