Film
Sarah’s Key
- Director
- Gilles Paquet-Brenner
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 110 mins
How do you engage today’s audiences with a little-known episode in 20th century history? By setting your story in two timeframes, of course, so a well-informed modern-day investigative journalist can fact the audience up under the guise of deploring her younger counterparts’ ignorance of the darkest period in their own nation’s recent past. Adapted from Tatiana de Rosnay‘s bestseller, Sarah’s Key is a fictional story set against the real-life backdrop of the July 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv round up by French police of 13,000 Jews, most of whom were shipped off to Auschwitz for extermination. It’s impeccably solemn, with an appropriately mournful score, plenty of well acted soul-searching, and nods in the direction of The Reader and the story of Anne Frank, but never quite manages to offer a convincing answer to the question: does the world really need yet another Holocaust movie? Especially as – in one of those increasingly bizarre movie coincidences – exactly the same subject was covered in The Round Up, which was also released in 2010.
Playing a French-speaking American in Paris (which is just showing off, really), English actress Kristin Scott Thomas is serious journalist Julia Armond, who sets out to investigate this poorly recorded period of shame. Sixty-seven years earlier, 10-year-old Sarah Starzynski (Melusine Mayance) locks her little brother Michel in a concealed bedroom cupboard when her family are rousted from their home and packed off on a terrifying journey – depicted largely through the little girl’s eyes – to the concentration camps. Back in 2009, Julia makes a chilling discovery: the apartment she is about to move in to, which has been owned by her husband’s family since – ulp! – August 1942, was formerly occupied by the Starzynskis. As skeletons literally tumble from the closet, she also becomes convinced that Sarah survived the war.
As earnest as you might anticipate, Sarah’s Key is also involving without becoming overly manipulative or offering easy, comfortable resolutions to actions that resonate down through generations. Kristin Scott Thomas’s typically brittle performance helps in keeping such pitfalls at bay, while Melusine Mayance is equally impressive as the terrified yet determined and resourceful Sarah. That said, we could have done without Julia’s modern-day abortion dilemma, which adds virtually nothing to the story and threatens to set up some dodgy equivalence between her trauma and Sarah’s.
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