La llave de Sarah

Sarah's Key (2010)

A two pronged film with a harrowing account of French anti-Semitism in World War II paralleling a contemporary account of a reporter discovering the details of one Jewish family destroyed by those events. Eventually the tales collide, and coincide, and another kind of meaning arises about accountability and acceptance.

At first this tale might strike you as both forced--the two narratives are very disjointed and separate, back and forth--and painfully familiar--another riveting, heart wrenching version of Jewish suffering and determination during the Holocaust. But stick with it, because it picks up complexity and nuance as it goes. Once you realize the roundup and mistreatment and eventual killing of the Jews is led in this case by French officials, you know this has a different kind of chill to it. And then you find that the contemporary story is literally connected to the 1940s story.

The leading actress in the 2010 thread, Kristin Scott Thomas, is one of those rare actresses who can command the screen with quiet brooding. She's convincing in a way that we identify with, and our sympathies are with her from the start. As she uncovers the facts of the past, and faces varying degrees of concern and indifference, she herself undergoes a transformation. This, by the end, is really what the story is about, the pertinence for our own times. The specific events around the title idea, the young girl's key, are horrifying to the point of being slightly sensationalist, but the rest of the movie is so studied and careful, you take it in stride.

In all I was surprised and eventually deeply moved by this movie. It's filmed with exquisite camera-work and is sharply edited. And most of all, director Gilles Paquet-Brenner gets the most from all the actors, from the children in the prison camp to the adults on all sides showing their human sides in restrained ways, without caricature.

When a Jewish family get arrested by Hitler siding French police, young Sarah not understanding the magnitude of what is occurring locks her younger brother in a closet, expecting to come back and recover him shortly. Realizing quickly that the situation she is in is far more terrible than expected she is desperate to escape and set him free. Sick, her and her family are taken to a camp where parents are separated from the children and are never seen again. Recovered Sarah and another young girl find an escape and run through the countryside to safety. The other girl becomes sick and they are both taken in by a older French couple but as the girl worsens there is a risk of exposing the girls as Jews. Although the young girl doesn't make it, Sarah is hidden away till the Nazi's leave and Sarah pleads with them to take her to Paris to find her brother. The journey is fraught with danger and the end obvious to us.

In modern day Paris, Julia and her family inspect an apartment of her in laws that her architect French husband will redo. Julia, am American, works as a journalist and wants to cover a story about the use of a velodrome where Parisian Jews where herded to and discovers the story of Sarah. An obsession grows as Julia is determined to find out what happened to the young girl and to find out how her husbands family came to own the flat.

This is a very fine film that is equally a historical story as well as a mystery as Julia seeks out the truth with a fine performance by Kristen Scott Thomas as Julia. The film flit's between the too separate yet connected story lines. Scenes of confusion within the velodrome are horrid too watch as are the scenes of separation of parents and children in the camp. We as the audience can almost guess the outcome of Sarah's young brother left locked in a closet whose key Sarah clings to, yet the outcome is still gut wrenching and Sarah's scream is enough for us to understand what she finds without us having to have it confirmed visually.

The obsession of Julia is a fascinating one; trying to work out first how the flat became someone elses, to searching for some sign of what became of the young girl takes her her far and wide and she encounters an array of people including Sarah's son, who is clueless to his Mother's past.

Scott Thomas gives quite a wonderful yet almost subdued performance as she struggles with the horrors of the past and her families connection to events as well as dealing with her own personal torment. The film is extraordinarily moving in it's telling of Sarah with her experience resonating and shaping those that come after her. Yet because the film chooses to focus on two timelines, we are never entirely dragged into the horrors of the Holocaust and whilst we are never far from them, it never overbalances itself. It is a fine film that depicted another story of the many thousands that WWII has given us, one that for France is of shame and one that, as with so many others continues to be relevant and effect those generations after.

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An American journalist in Paris embarks on a story about the Holocaust and discovers connections between the past, her present marriage and her unborn child. Beginning as an article on the 1942 roundup of Jews in France as they were sent off to Auschwitz, it soon becomes a journey of self-discovery as the protagonist stumbles upon a terrible secret of a family forced out of their home and a young girl called Sarah who makes an impulsive decision to leave her younger brother locked in a cupboard. A film about the Holocaust is certain to be moving, but the circumstances in this one are harrowing, the truth astonishing, and the coincidences as unbelievable as the tragedy itself. It is a journalist's quest to dig up the lives of others and unleash the truth, but this film show the price of these actions. Sarah's Key takes us from Paris to Brooklyn to Florence and ultimately to the centre of the heart – showing that even the truth has its cost. And the sadness, as much as we try to unlock it, can never be erased.

I was invited to this movie and had no idea of what it was about. Well it did not take long to know it was another holocaust story! I too like the way it was done with an opening into the dark past, about one week after I was born, so we're looking at almost 70 years ago, then we move back and force into last year 2009(not counting the last two days in 2011). There is a point made clear that this horror actually in this case was mainly perpetrated by French people themselves. It seems inconceivable, but the sad truth is that Jews weren't really the flavour of the era in Europe and this certainly made the task easier for the Nazis. But this story is really focused on one little girl who is caught in a two fold tragedy, perhaps one fold to prevent another. This impact the rest of the story with enormous consequences. We are to follow it through the research of a journalist who became obsessed with her finding about it. A well worth effort for all concerned. I will have to come back here for those talented and knowledgeable reviewers to learn a little more about it. But for now I have to say it was an excellent film

Some years ago, a young friend quit a promising career at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Asked her superiors what they could to retain her services, she replied: "You could give it a happier ending." I can understand why many film-goers might feel they've seen all the Holocaust movies they can handle.

"Sophie's Key" ought to be an exception. Of all the countries occupied by Nazi Germany, France has been the last to acknowledge its complicity in the slaughter of its Jewish citizens. This is a French film about the roundup of Parisian Jews by French police. If they survived the trip, they ended up in Auschwitz, a numerous sliver of the six million exterminated in the "Final Solution."

In the foreground, the story centers on Sophie, a 10-year-old (Melusine Mayance), and the effort of an American journalist (Kristen Scott Thomas) to discover what happened to the family that lived in the apartment she and her husband now occupy. Although well done, the story doesn't really matter. It is one more of the stories, fact or fiction, that have been told and may yet be told of every victim seized and slaughtered.

But mostly they are stories about the Nazis themselves. Here it is a story about French victims of the French government told by French film-makers. Scott Thomas, the English actress who has spent much of her life in France, is just about the only non-Frenchman in this film, and, as usual, she is a magnetic presence. Young Sophie (Mayance) is the film's other pillar. The older Sophie (Charlotte Poutrel) is given little to do except to be beautiful and act troubled but that's quite enough.

No need to spoil the story by telling any part of it. But the role of the Vichy government in the slaughter of French citizens is a part of history that needs to be remembered.