Review of Un amour à taire

No film about the Holocaust is easy to watch, but some are more difficult than others. "Un amour a taire" deals with the persecution and extermination of homosexuals and, more peripherally, with the persecution of the Jews. In that respect, it approaches the nightmare experience of 20th Century Europe and, more specifically, France from a different angle that has not been much explored. It deserves to be seen for that reason alone. It has an excellent cast, a tightly written script, and a tragic personal story at its core impacting a single family. It begins with two homosexuals sheltering a young Jewish girl (Louise Monot), but it is the homosexuals who are exposed, not the girl, by the not-exactly-intentional betrayal by the younger brother (Nicholas Gob) of the member of the homosexual pair (Jeremie Renier) who was the young Jewish girl's childhood friend. Jean, Renier's character, ends up in a re-education labor camp and subsequently in Dachau, while his lover, Philippe (Bruno Todeschini) is shot dead when he tries to flee storm troopers who have come to arrest him. Jean comes back at the end of the war in a vegetative condition, having been subjected to medical experiments including a lobotomy and dies shortly afterward. The younger brother, Jacques, (Gob) marries Sarah (Monot), who, despite his sexuality, loved Jean, and Jacques and Sarah have a child. But when French Free Forces return to Paris, Jacques is exposed as having trafficked in goods stolen from Jewish families and having caused his brother to be arrested with the intention of freeing him the next day to rehabilitate his own reputation with his family. I did not find the film anywhere near as moving, personally, as "The Pawn Broker" or one or two other Holocaust films but it is wrenching nevertheless and no more pleasant to watch than any of the others. If there's anyone out there who was unaware of the persecution and murder of homosexuals, this film tells a story that is scarcely mentioned in any other Holocaust film.