Victor (Hippolyte Giradot), the troubled, even tormented Parisian hero in Amos Gitai’s One Day You’ll Understand, spends much of his time and energies over the course of the film trying to understand the obscured experiences of his family during the Second World War German occupation of France. His mother Rivka (Jeanne Moreau), the only surviving family member of that period, never broaches the subject and, for reasons the film never makes explicit, avoids answering questions about it. But Victor, in middle age and for his own reasons, has become intent on finding answers.

Early on, we find him in his governmental ministry office poring over family documents and asking himself distractedly: “What did she do in Paris? How did she manage?” One Day never provides much of an answer to these questions. Gitai, an Israeli, isn’t concerned with such things, but rather with the generation of such questions among people who are close to each other.

Here and there, it’s possible to perceive that he’s partly inspired by the longstanding French evasion of important elements of the nation’s war history, especially those concerning widespread collaboration in the arrest and deportation of over 76,000 native French and foreign-born Jews, an evasion that largely prevailed for decades. (Not until July 1994 did the French government acknowledge this complicity.) One of the few concrete facts that Victor manages to discover is the betrayal by an informer of his mother’s parents before they were hauled off to their deaths in a camp. But this is mentioned only in passing. Facts, however much they’ve become the object of Victor’s obsessed but ineffective pursuit, don’t seem to be the point of Gitai’s film. Instead, he has worked to convey a sense of the uncommunicated stories and secrets that may follow from the terrible disruptions and destruction of such a national and personal experience, even among family members.

The film is also unusual because it concentrates not on a story of collaboration, or on the ideological monsters who solicited such unholy cooperation, but on a family that was brutally victimized. But unlike his central character, Gitai doesn’t try to track that story. He records events in Victor’s driven, anguished attempts to gain access and come to some kind of terms with his family’s past.

Rivka, who presumably controls the access to that past, doesn’t want to relinquish it, whatever her reasons. She loves Victor, his older sister, and her two grandchildren, but she seems to have come to terms with that history in ways that don’t include reliving it with others, even loved ones. Francoise (Emmanuelle Devos), Victor’s wife, tells him he can’t change that history, and that his mother is only trying to protect him. Gitai doesn’t make it easy for us to assess that sentiment, but he does give us small glimpses of Rivka’s mindset and sensibility. In the film’s very first scene we find her absorbed in television coverage of the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the gestapo official known as the Butcher of Lyon. Victor is in his office listening to radio broadcasts of the same event, but he doesn’t know of his parent’s interest. Later, in an unusually emotional scene, Rivka tries to convey a portion of what she obviously regards as the family’s heritage to Victor’s adolescent son and daughter, as if she had to skip a generation to address the matter.

The great Moreau gives this strong, unyielding bourgeois woman a plausibility even though we’re left with much of her mystery unpenetrated. Part of this is from Moreau’s long-established ability to command a space on screen without large gestures. There is an eloquent economy in her performance.

Gitai’s film cautiously approaches and circles its characters and their interactions, stopping frequently to observe them. His camera work is sometimes unobtrusive, and at others calls attention to itself in long tracking shots and obliquely dramatic compositions. The effect is alternately intimate and distancing.

One Day has an unresolved quality that does an audience few favors, but despite its deliberately blunted impact it has a delayed and lingering power.