Early in Amos Gitai's adaptation of Jérôme Clément's
autobiographical novel Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras (a.k.a. One Day You'll
Understand), businessman
Hippolyte Girardot putters around his opulent office, sorting papers, while the
radio broadcasts testimony from the trial of former Gestapo captain Klaus
Barbie. It's 1987, and the Barbie trial has all of France in a reflective mood,
reconsidering the parts they or their parents played during the Nazi
occupation, and whether they could've—or should've—done more to ward off the
encroaching evil. Girardot gets so stirred up that he confronts his mother
Jeanne Moreau when he finds a document his father once signed declaring his
family to be "Aryan." Girardot wants to know whether that made his parents
collaborators, even though his sister insists that those kinds of declarations
were compulsory, and his wife Emmanuelle Devos warns, "You can't change
history."
One Day You'll Understand is as slow-paced as Gitai's films
usually are, and the characters are as typically one-dimensional, existing
primarily to embody a problem or a point of view. But the film is also steeped
in deep sorrow, and when Moreau breaks down crying on Yom Kippur while trying
to explain herself to her grandkids, One Day reaches an emotional level well
above Gitai's typical remove. Girardot too is compelling, as he picks through
the World War II-era souvenirs in his family's home and wonders which of them
might be gifts from the Nazis, or as he flips through photo albums, looking for
deeper meanings in the cars his parents drove, the clothes they wore, and the
places they visited. After he's spent most of a weekend morning obsessing and
worrying, Girardot rounds up Devos and their kids and heads out for an
afternoon in the country, enjoying his own privilege without wringing his hands
too much about how he attained it. But as the film's title implies, someday he
might connect the dots.