For me this film is unsuccessful in intermingling the issue of antisemitism with the coming of age of a relatively studious young woman. On one level the Jude Law character might be only marginally deeper than his disgustingly callow friends. He is attracted by the young woman's seriousness and relatively shy affection for him but this attraction is offset by her social conservatism. The depth of any antisemitism in him or amongst his silly friends is never explored. In the end the motivation of his character, and the point of the film, elude me. An interpretation that springs to mind is that gentiles do not feel the significance of the holocaust, that they trivialise it. Part of coming of age for jewish girls is therefore that they should (or simply do) experience failed love affairs with gentiles. The fact that these affairs fail for these reasons is somehow constructively educational for the girls. I truly hope this is not intended to be the message.

"I Love You, I Love You Not" is an ambiguous and confused movie about a Jewish prep school girl in NYC (Danes) who spends a lot of time hanging out and acting oh so very "girl" with her "nana" (Moreau) and falls for a too charming and over-acting Jude Law. A mess of a movie which spins nonsense around solid performances by Danes and Moreau, this flick has little to offer. Hey, if my grandma told me scary bedtime stories about the Angel of Death and the horrors of the holocaust at that tender age, I'd have issues too. Pass on this bit of fluff.

Racism isn't always violent, verbal or obvious. It is usually so subtle and invisible that even those who have racist tendencies don't even realize that they are there. This deals with subconscious feelings of antisemitism, still prevalent more than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust. It's a story of one's own need to accept their heritage, to face their own prejudices towards their own background. Troubled teenager Claire Danes has trouble with her Jewish heritage even though she loves her Holocaust surviving grandmother (Jeanne Moreau) more than her own parents. Their relationship is one of a brutal honesty, and Danes must undergo her own hurts to come to terms with the legacy of decades before.

While Danes is excellent, it's the very real, haunting performance by the legendary Jeanne Moreau that really strikes gold here. She wears the Auschwitz numbers on her arm, not because she has no choice, but because she has to, for her own survival, to teach the lessons of tolerance, to educate to prevent future atrocities, to help her beloved granddaughter accept herself.

I once knew a lady who does what Moreau did here, going to school to share her experiences, always with a glow on her face, that victory over death, simply because she survived. I often wondered if she was asked all of the dumb questions from naive and insensitive high school students. Questions like, Did you know Anne Frank? Did you ever see Hitler?, etc., and more realistic, caring questions like, Did your family survive?

There's the subplot between Danes and hunky Jude Law, the most popular boy in her class, who awakens Danes to her feelings and allows Danes to reveal who she is. He isn't revealed to be antisemitic, just frustrated by her inability to relax, and it is his frustration with her that leads her to finally un-bottle all of the insecurities inside her. While her sufferings are minor compared to get grandmother's, she needs something to pull her out of that shell.