Pour une femme

We got to see this interesting French film as part of this year's Jewish Film Festival in San Jose, CA. The story's about a couple who escaped a Nazi death camp partly because of the subterfuge of being engaged. They married, had kids, separated, and died. The movie jumps between 1947, shortly into the marriage, and the decade of the 1980s, when the mother has died and the father is ill. The younger of the couple's two daughters is a filmmaker going through her mother's mementos and reconstructing the events of the early marriage. During the period in 1947, the husband's brother reappears. He was thought to have been killed in the war and his reappearance creates many questions and triggers stresses in the marriage.

All of this occurs at a pace that seems like a French film, which is what it is. The movie takes plenty of time to unwind the story and it's a complex story. Things are not what they seem, people change. In the end, most things are resolved.

I really like this film as a way of tapping into a very personal French perspective on World War II, Nazis, and the Holocaust. It's a rich story, well told.