Patrick Bruel, left, Cecile de France and Valentin Vigourt star in the French film, A Secret, based upon a personal family history.

Strand Releasing

Claude Miller’s haunting new movie, based on a novel by Philippe Grimbert, is called A Secret. But the gist of this story of repression and family tragedy is that secrets are rarely singular. What is hidden from sight and excluded from discussion has a tendency to multiply and expand.

Scrupulously following the path laid down by Grimbert, a French psychoanalyst who based his book (published in the United States as Memory) on his family’s history, Miller sets out to solve mysteries and clarify ambiguities. Yet even as factual questions are answered, and the basic curiosity of both the audience and the main character is satisfied, A Secret leaves in place a sense that something horribly and splendidly strange can lie under the surface of ordinary experience.

A similar feeling of uncanniness hovers around young Francois Grimbert as he grows up in Paris in the 1950s. Played as a young boy by Valentin Vigourt and as an adolescent by Quentin Dubuis, Francois is the skinny, sickly son of two marvelously athletic parents.

For a while, he dreams up a stronger, fitter, more charismatic older brother to compensate for his own feelings of inadequacy. Only gradually does he learn that such a sibling — a half-brother named Simon, the apple of his father’s eye — really existed.

Simon, then, is the big secret: a double, a precursor and an alternate self for Francois. But the discovery of this lost brother opens the door for further revelations and deeper enigmas. Francois knows that his mother and father, Tania (Cecile de France) and Maxime (Patrick Bruel), met sometime around the war, and he imagines their courtship and early marriage as a romantic idyll in the shadow of atrocities nobody much talks about anymore.

Instead, he learns from their friend and neighbor Louise (Julie Depardieu) that Maxime and Tania and their families were terribly damaged by the terror and bigotry that overran Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

To describe A Secret as a Holocaust movie would be accurate, but misleading. Its chronology is complex and elusive. It shifts from the immediate postwar years into the 1980s, when Francois is played by Mathieu Amalric, and the images are drained of color, and then back into the anxiety and panic of impending and actual war. In those days Maxime spelled his last name Grinberg, he was married to a woman named Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier) and the two of them occupied the stolid center of a large and complicated extended Jewish family.

That family, as it heads toward catastrophe, is as much the setting of the story as its subject, and their fate as Jews under Nazi occupation is entangled in murky, sticky domestic issues of jealousy, betrayal and desire.

What is most impressive about A Secret is the way Miller artfully and gently gestures toward such enormous themes without spelling them out. Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision.

The middle of the film is a perfect novella of confused passion and ethical struggle, a love triangle beautifully acted by Sagnier, Bruel and De France.

Tania, a former model and an expert diver, seems not only like a perfect match for Maxime, a gymnast and wrestler, but also an embodiment of the Aryan ideal celebrated at the Berlin Olympics. She and Maxime, who puffs up with French patriotism, seem to be in flight not only from the Nazis and their spouses, but also from the inconvenient fact of their Jewishness.

A Secret, based on the writing of their affectionate and loyal son, does not criticize them. Rather, the film endows them, and everyone around them, with a dense and exquisite humanity, so that their story is freed from the pressure of making a point or teaching a lesson. Instead, terrible decisions and difficult emotions are laid bare, even as the most profound secrets of history and of family life are respected.

****A Secret

Starring: Cecile de France, Patrick Bruel, Ludivine Sagnier, Julie Depardieu, Orlando Nicoletti, Valentin Vigourt, Quentin Dubuis, Mathieu Amalric. In French with English subtitles.

Rated: Not rated, contains adult themes.