What’s in a name? People have been pondering that for ages, Shakespeare did in Romeo & Juliet, Arthur Miller did in The Crucible, and Victor Hugo did in Les Misérables. Secret Name, directed by Aurélia Georges and co-written with Maud Ameline based on a literary work by Wilkie Collins, follows in that tradition. It centers on women, their value/worth in society and the world, and the weight of a name.
Nélie Laborde starts the film as a maid, but when the master of the house pushes up her skirt against her will, it is she who is out on the streets. It’s quickly established she’s been on the streets before; she’s had to sell herself to survive before.
When WWI breaks out, she joins the Red Cross. On one of her runs, she sees a woman stranded on the side of the road and brings her back to their base (a house they are treating the wounded in), setting up the main plot. They’re bombed and the woman, Rose Julliet, who has connections to society in Nancy, doesn’t make it. Nélie is left alone. She takes on Rose’s identity and goes to Nancy to take Rose’s place as a reader for a wealthy older lady.
The presence or, more accurately, lack of presence of the war was unexpected but very much felt in line with the world of the movie. A society world that would’ve been just as suited for the 1850s as it was for 1914. After Nélie left the front lines, you don’t see signs of the war again until the end of the film when the war finally comes to society town; Julien joins the army to beat the draft, and the Madam goes for one last drive in her car before it too is commandeered by the army.
Nélie’s a smart girl, and on her first night in the manor, she heads to the library and does research on Switzerland, where Rose is from, so that she will be convincing in her lie. However, after her initial lies go well, she gets cocky and expands her backstory, adding other things she’s read about, including giving herself time living in Spain. Stuff that could be checked out, if someone wanted to look into her story.
Outside of the main story, there were a lot of little touches that just made the world more real, more lived in. Be it the kids passing a feather in church or the maids laying the silverware, tongs downward instead of upward.
You constantly think Nélie’s on the verge of being caught, part of the suspense of the film, but she doesn’t. This is the weight of her new name. She can behave in ways that should get her questioned, including knowing the address for a house for women in trouble for a dismissed maid, and yet no one questions her identity, believing her to be Rose.
During the scene when she’s seeing off the dismissed maid, the maid says she hopes she’s not having a girl because “We’re born to suffer.” She’s verbalizing a theme in the film, the lack of agency women had in their lives, and how those Dickensian/Horatio Alger stories were of changing your class weren’t for women. Which is exactly what Nélie did but to do so she had to take the name of dead society girl. It becomes more apparent when Rose, the real Rose, arrives, having not died after all (Nélie clearly can’t do a pulse check). And of course, instead of coming clean with the truth, Nélie lies and says that Rose was the nurse. And she is believed and Rose is sent away by the Madam. What started as just trying to escape her own life transforms into her actively trying to steal Rose’s, egged on by Rose saying to Nélie, “You’ll never be like us.” She eventually goes as far as to have Rose committed to a mental institution.
However, Julien, who is Madam’s relation, decides to find someone that knew Nélie to clear things up. Even as it looks like the truth will come out, Nélie continues to behave in ways that could expose her true identity. In a desperate act to save Madam, she has to rely on her nursing skills, revealing the truth to the head of the household. When he doesn’t reveal what he discovered to madam, and Julien returns convinced she is Rose, Nélie’s free to continue to the ruse, with the real Rose locked away.
This brings us back to Les Misérables, a book she Nélie was given by her mother and carried with her to the front lines, only now she connects to Jean Valjean when she reads a passage about him stealing a coin from a child to Madam. Faced with the real Rose again, she must choose to either remain silent or own her own name. And what’s in a name?
It played at Locarno Film Festival in their Concorso iternazionale section.