Cécile De France, Patrick Bruel and Ludivine Sagnier make an ideal love triangle, the women falling prey to Bruel’s restless self-absorption. Interestingly for a movie about Jewish identity, only Bruel is Jewish.

• De France makes the strongest impression as a lithe object of desire, her characteristic role, as for instance the cool lesbian she played in The Spanish Apartment and Russian Dolls.
• Bruel’s dark intensity makes him credible as a guy who seeks to shed his identity as easily as he dominates in the gym. No wonder he’s huge in France.
• Sagnier is especially touching as a lovely woman scorned, another great preformance from the actress who later played Uday Hussein’s #1 courtier in The Devil’s Double.

Their supporting cast is equally strong.

• Julie Depardieu as a family friend who can’t keep a secret, in part because she harbors a secret love herself. Depardieu? Yes, Gerard’s daughter.
• Valentin Vigourt, Quentin Dubuis and Mathieu Amalric as a weakling son at ages 7, 14 and 37. Vigourt creates the strongest impression as a little boy unfairly rejected. Amalric is a somewhat familiar face to American audiences from his disappointing appearance in Quantum of Solace.
• Orlando Nicoletti as a perfect boy who haunts the movie.

Then there’s the cameo by Philippe Grimbert. Who’s he? The author of the source novel.

Renowned French director Claude Miller made a lifetime of films before doing one near to his own origins as a French Jew. He based A Secret on the autobiography of French author and psychoanalyst Philippe Grimbert. The film hews so close to its origins that the lead character changes his name from Grinberg to the less Semitic Grimbert, no doubt as the author’s family did.

The film impressively and affectingly begins as the sad story of a slight boy rejected by his macho father, then shifts to something much more thematically and cinematically complex. Bravo.

The horrors of Holocaust violence are offscreen, though their threat hangs over the proceedings like an invisible fog.

OTOH, the sexual power exuded by Cécile De France’s model athlete suffuses the movie, leading to a couple of mildly erotic scenes.

More tenderly, a macho father rejects his weakling son starting at a young age. Soft-hearted viewers might have trouble viewing this.

The tentacles of the Final Solution stretched far and wide, as did casual antisemitism in countries like France. The former isn’t a surprise, though that makes it no less heartbreaking. The latter is an ongoing revelation for we lucky Americans.