Review

Adapted from Jérôme Clément’s autobiographical novel by Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai is an intimate drama about family secrets, a child’s struggle for identity and his parents' role in this seminal search, all couched within the contours of a Holocaust film. Gitai asks whose rights are greater. Does an elderly mother –- named Rivka Raymonde (née Gornick) and played by the ever-iconic Jeanne Moreau –- a woman who survived an event that took her entire family, have the right to her willful denial and refusal to talk about it? Or is her grown son’s (Hippolyte Girardot) need to know about his heritage more important? The search for an answer sets the stage for a contest of wills that offers no conclusion or winner. There’s a telling moment early on when Rivka, preparing for dinner with her son, fusses like an actress getting ready to give a "performance." And, yes, Jeanne Moreau is still, well, Jeanne Moreau.

 -- Joe Baltake