Written by Linda
July 28, 2011
If I were to take an editor's scissors, I'd completely chop out the modern framing of Sarah's Key, leaving an excellent and extremely moving Holocaust drama.
Sarah's Key, a Holocaust drama that splits it story between World War II and modern day, totally had me for the first 2/3rds of the film. I kept consciously thinking how very, very good the movie was. Shocking, sad, disturbing, and tense, the story totally had me (as I wiped away tears every five minutes or so). Then, when the film's main tension reaches an emotional peak, the film just kind of fizzles, losing momentum, like water slowly draining in a sink.
Based on the bestseller by Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key revolves around a French Jewish girl named Sarah Starzynski (the excellent Mélusine Mayance). In 1943 Paris, Sarah and her little brother Michel (Paul Mercier) are playing in their room, innocently giggling and playing under the sheets of the bed, when there is a sudden loud knock on the apartment door. It is the French police. The family is ordered to pack 3 days' worth of supplies, and come with them immediately. Sarah, in a moment of panic and sisterly love, locks her little brother in a secret closet with a hidden door to protect him. It will only be three days, right? Oh, geez, you just know this can't be good.
The family, along with 13,000 other French Jews, is taken to a makeshift transit station, which is actually the old velodrome, known as Vel d’Hiv. For days, thousands of people with no water, food, or toilets, are held in the gigantic ghostly hall meant for sports, but converted into a hellhole of horror and despair. Sounds eerily like the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, doesn't it (a comparison not lost on the filmmaker)? As the Jews are transferred to another temporary camp, with the ultimate destination of Auschwitz, young Sarah is hysterical at the thought of getting back to their apartment in Paris to release her brother with the key she secretly keeps.
Now this part alone is excellent. What becomes the distraction then annoyance of Sarah's Key is that old standby gimmick of alternating the historical story with a modern mystery. Kristin Scott Thomas (bless her gorgeous cheekbones), is Julia, an American married into a French family. She is also a journalist, and discovers a link between her exposé article about the Vel d’Hiv horror and the Paris apartment that her in-laws have owned for 60 years. Julia's research uncovers Sarah's mystery, filling in the gaps from the past to the present.
But you know what? I didn't need the pretension of a modern sleuth to figure things out for me. The WWII scenes of Sarah's Key were so very good, that I could have taken an editor's pair of scissors and snipped out all the modern bits, leaving an excellent and moving story about the war. As it is, Sarah's Key is still worth seeing for the first 2/3rds for sure. It's just too bad that the rest of the film is meh.
