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Aug. 26, 2011
Coverging past and present
Sarah’s Key, set in France, unlocks war’s many moral dilemmas.
MICHAEL FOX
The worthy French film Sarah’s Key has two overriding aims, like the 2007 novel by Tatiana de Rosnay from which it’s adapted. The first is to expose a generally unknown – or wilfully forgotten – chapter in France’s long, blemished relationship with its Jewish population. The other is to connect the Holocaust to the present in a way that makes it come alive for contemporary audiences who are a couple of generations and thousands of miles removed.
To that end, the film shifts back and forth between Sarah, a Jewish child in Paris in 1942, and Julia, an American journalist in the City of Light, 60 years later. One storyline, however, proves immeasurably more compelling than the other.
Frankly, it’s gratifying to report that the Holocaust-era saga is the primary reason to see Sarah’s Key. The riveting (albeit fictional) wartime events deliver a knockout emotional punch, while the present-day story dissolves into half-hearted melodrama and half-baked contrivance. On balance, though, the good far outweighs the hokum.
At its core, Sarah’s Key wants to engage viewers in profound moral questions of responsibility and behavior. The most uncomfortable probes would seem to be directed at non-Jews, but the notion of passive participation in injustice, persecution and murder is surely relevant to anyone.
In 1942, the Paris police arrested thousands of Jews and confined them for several frightening days in the Velodrome d’Hiver (Vel d’Hiv), an indoor stadium, before shipping them to Auschwitz. (This despicable episode is a crucial part of the subtext of another current French release, the screwball comedy The Names of Love.)
Sarah’s Key imagines Sarah and her parents among the arrestees and, further, that the quick-thinking girl has concealed her little brother in their apartment before the gendarmes hustle the family away.
Once it dawns on Sarah that her brother’s fate is in her hands, she embarks on a daunting mission that compels her to depend on the kindness of strangers. Some neighbors lob antisemitic insults as Jews are taken from their homes, while others take action – for or against their Jewish neighbors – expressions of a mercenary sort of self-interest.
It is the latter possibility that chills Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), a Paris-based American researching a magazine story commemorating the 60th anniversary of the roundup. Incredibly, she discovers that the apartment she and her French husband are redecorating, and which his family has long owned, belonged to Sarah’s family.
Did Julia’s in-laws accidentally benefit from the expulsion of Jews? Or, horrible as it is to contemplate, were they abettors and collaborators, propelled by hatred and/or opportunism?
This is a mystery fraught with consequences, no doubt about it. But once the secret is revealed, Julia’s life devolves into prosaic melodrama.
The usually remarkable Scott Thomas gives a pedestrian, unmemorable performance, but it can’t be laid entirely at her feet. It’s unavoidable that the stuff of Julia’s life – a self-absorbed husband, an unexpected pregnancy – would seem trivial next to the life-and-death dangers, traumas and sorrows that buffet the young Sarah.
Ultimately, Sarah’s Key has a third goal, to leave viewers mulling about what we would do if our neighbors were hauled away. Would we conceal and shelter the innocent (at great personal risk) or would we benefit from the spoils? It is that personal connection, across the years and miles, that makes Sarah’s Key a moving and worthwhile addition to the filmography of the Holocaust.
Sarah’s Key opens Aug. 26 at Fifth Avenue Cinemas in Vancouver.
Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
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