DVD Review: Les Amours Secretes (Louise's Diary 1942)

★★½☆☆


Amidst the death and heartbreak of the Nazi occupation of France, in Les Amours Secretes, we find love in the most unlikely of couplings.

Sarah (Deborah Durand), a young Jewish woman living under the assumed name Louise, enjoys an illicit romance with strapping SS officer Hans (Gregory Barboza). By day she hides at Huguette’s (Frederique Dupre) refuge for those wishing to evade the potentially murderous eyes of the country’s occupiers; by night she joins Huguette at the local cabaret: serenading the local men, and indulging her relationship with Hans.
Thanks to the efforts of Hans; those other residents at Huguette’s refuge, Jewish lad Robert (Sullivan Leray) and resistance fighter Michel (Emni Blackori), are supplied with false papers and new identities in order to escape the country and probable death. But the uneasy relationship between the fugitives and their Nazi benefactor, along with the simple love affair at its core, exists in constant fear of discovery; and it seems inevitable that the fragile balance will eventually be disturbed.

There is a moment, approximately halfway through Franck Phelizon’s film, in which the entire philosophy of the story can be seen and heard. Young Robert, who has developed an intense affection for Louise, massages her feet following a clumsy fall in the farmyard. Being several years her junior and less learned in the ways of the world, he asks her if age should ever stand in the way of love. Louise’s response is that it should not; it is infinite and knows no bounds. The union between two individuals, across two worlds as colossally opposed as Judaism and Nazism takes this message and applies it in the most extreme example. That amongst prejudice and hate, love can blossom also, is a message that the film makes abundantly clear.
What else we are to glean from the experience is less clear. Because the lovers find themselves so deeply enraptured by their love, there exists between them precisely no tension. We are told that Hans that, despite wearing the garb of an SS officer, rejects the ideology that accompanies it completely. Hans it seems is not a raving fascist, but a peaceable, affable young chap filled with a desire to help those individuals his country seeks to destroy. Louise too fells no conflict at the thought of cavorting with a young SS-man; so strong presumably is the connection which binds them. It’s left to the supporting characters to raise a distrustful eyebrow at the dubious arrangement, but even this suspicion is temporary. In terms of its dramatic effect, the result is a central relationship which comes across as worryingly uninteresting.

Amongst the idyllic countryside of rural France, perhaps hindered by a visual style one might uncharitably describe as ‘televisual’, there too exists no palpable sense of any real danger. The action, for the most part, seems to be taking place within its own little world, away from the troubles that we know should be lurking nearby. Its rural side is too pretty to evoke a genuine feeling of the downtrodden; it’s night-time escapes into fanciful cabaret, too minimal to properly highlight the hideous double-life, and the indulgent luxuriousness that continues to exist alongside the bullets and bombs.

Interesting and often tender, yet ultimately little more.

2.5/5

Reviewer: Chris Banks (@Chris_in_2D)
Release Date UK: 05 March 2012
Directed By:Franck Phelizon
Cast:Anémone, Deborah Durand, Grégory Barboza



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