The welcome signs at the New Hampshire border are bilingual---in both English and French. It took me half a dozen times of going there before I got used to being greeted with "bienvenue." It seems perfectly fitting therefore that I was back in the Granite State for my third French-language movie there in the last week.
It was not only another French-language movie, but moreover yet another Holocaust movie. All the trends in movie-watching habit seem to be converging.
To be honest, what interested me most about this outing was the theater itself. For the first time ever, I was on my way up to Concord, the capital, to attend a screening at the Red River Theaters, an independent movie house that I had seen featured on television a couple months ago when I first arrived in Massachusetts (map).
Unlike many independent houses, most of which are renovated establishments, this one was built entirely new and opened in October 2007. I had been waiting months for just the right opportunity to head up there and check the place out. Un secret had been showing in Boston for a while in December, and I thought I had missed the opportunity to see it, so when it showed up in Concord last week, it seemed like it my cue to head up there.
I left in mid afternoon so that I would get to Concord before sunset. I wanted to see the capitol dome in the bright sunlight. It is the oldest statehouse in continued use in the United States, and it was still open when I got there. I grabbed a brochure at the entrance and gave myself the self-guided tour, getting to kibbitz on a session-in-progress of the state assembly. Visiting statehouses is one of my hobbies, and New Hampshire's had been missing from list until today.
After a couple hours of wandering around the quaint but tiny little capital city in the bitter cold, I scooted over to the Red River, which is embedded inside a postmodern concrete plaza, enmeshed with a modern parking garage. From the entrance, one goes down a ramp into the ticketing area, which has cafe-style seating as well. The ticket for Un secret was only five bucks, and it came printed out in a concert-style format, as if I were going to see Coldplay. It will make a unique addition to my collection.
The downside, as the ticket attendant informed me, was that the movie was not showing in either of the two main auditoriums, but in the screening room. When I went inside, I learned that it meant a small room with four semi-arcs of straight-back chairs facing a DVD projector screen. "All this way to see a DVD," I muttered. "No wonder it was only five bucks."
Somewhat disappointed, I took a seat in the back row, but then had to move several times as people sat in front of me. It was simply impossible to see much of the screen with anyone in front of me, and for a movie with subtitles, this was unacceptable.
The projector apparatus meant the quality of the picture was a little washed out, and I think the aspect ratio was not quite correct. But the sound from the speakers was very good. I got used to everything after about fifteen minutes.
The movie stood up very well against the other Holocaust-themed movies I've seen recently, perhaps because it did not make the Holocaust the central theme of the movie. Rather it used the Holocaust as a context on which a more basic human-themed story takes place, specifically a love triangle in the middle of a destructive war.
I couldn't help notice how much story-technique overlap there was between this movie and the other Holocaust movies I've seen realized. I found myself getting deja vu on several instances, and not just when I saw the canonical shot of the piles of shoes at the concentration camp (a mandatory inclusion).
The story jumps around in time, ranging from 1955 to 1985, then back to 1936 and 1942, and so on. This reminded me a lot of The Reader. Moreover, the ending sequence with a father and his daughter is almost exactly the same as The Reader. The scenes of the Jewish refugees cutting down trees in the forest reminded me of the Defiance, which I haven't yet seen. The young boy protagonist has to learn the truth about the death camps in a way that is reminiscent of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas But most startling was the fact that young boy protagonist imagines he sees a ghostly presence of another boy, one who turns out to have been killed in the camps. This reminded me a lot of The Unborn.
It seems to be evidence for the thesis that narrative technique goes through phases, and that at any given time, one will find a lot of commonality in the imagery and plot devices between movies that share similar themes.
The movie zipped along fairly fast and did not tax my subtitle-reading skills, as did Un conte de Noel. One of my favorite parts of the film was that amongst the French, there was lots of spoken Yiddish, which is rarely heard in any movie, and (amazingly) was not heard at all in any of the other Holocaust movies I've seen recently.
To my relief, the straight-back chairs were comfortable enough to sit in for an hour and half. Like Un conte de Noel, Un secret had a strong supporting role by Mathieu Almaric, who was the bad-guy in the latest James Bond flick.
After the final credits, I slipped down the side hallway and snuck into the main auditoriums, where Slumdog Millionaire and Doubt were showing. I lingered for a few moments in each, just to get a feeling of the viewing experience. They were steep stadium-style, with the entrances at the top of the auditorium and the stairs going down toward the screen. All in all, a very nice configuration. My friend RS, who is an new urbanist architect, would have been pleased at it all.
I wished I had gotten a chance to enjoy these auditoriums. Maybe on my next trip to Concord. Parking the nearby garage turned out to be free in the evening. Magnifique!
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