"Sarah's Key" is more powerful than you expect, maybe even more powerful than it should be. An emotional detective story based on an international best-seller by Tatiana de Rosnay, its Holocaust-connected narrative goes back and forth between moments of strength and those that fall flat. The uninspired elements encourage you to dismiss it, but the compelling sequences won't allow that to happen.
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas as an American journalist living in Paris, "Sarah's Key" also goes back and forth between events in 2002 and what happened 60 years earlier during the city's infamous Velodrome d'Hiver roundup of July 16, 1942, an event little known in this country and for many years not mentioned in France either.
On that date French officials and police rounded up 13,000 of the city's Jews, herded them together for days in horrible conditions in one of the city's indoor bicycle-racing tracks before dispatching them first to a transit camp and finally to Auschwitz.
Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner starts the film on that July day in 1942, in the Marais district apartment of the Starzynskis. With the family being rounded up under frightening circumstances, 10-year-old Sarah (an exceptional Melusine Mayance) impulsively instructs her younger brother to hide in the bedroom cupboard. She then locks him in, instructing him not to leave until she comes to get him.
"Sarah's Key" is at its best in detailing with great skill what happens to this young girl and her parents over the next several days, starting with the nightmarish situation both at the velodrome and the transit camp at Beaune-la-Rolande where Sarah and her family are sent.
The pure maddening chaos of these situations, their urgency, terror and violence, are compellingly conveyed by Paquet-Brenner and his cinematographer, Pascal Ridao, who shot all the 1942 action with a hand-held camera. These sequences alternate with those set in 2002 involving Scott Thomas' Julia Jarmond, living in Paris with a French architect husband who convinces her magazine to let her do a major story on the 60th anniversary of the velodrome events.
In the commercial fiction contrivance that is the heart of the novel's success, Julia soon finds out that her husband's family has a connection to that Marais apartment; she becomes understandably obsessed with finding out both what the family's role in that long-ago situation was and what finally happened to 10-year-old Sarah and her brother.
Though Scott Thomas is fluent and on target acting in both English and French, "Sarah's Key" is not equally involving in both languages. And the 2002 sequences, which feature conversations in English with work colleagues and others, are so conventionally written and directed they come off as flat and unconvincing. As is often the case with filmmakers working in a language not their own, these scenes feel like they're not just in another tongue, they're in another movie.
These sequences are a big part of "Sarah's Key" and a considerable obstacle in the way of the film's effectiveness. Finally, however, the historical situations have enough impact to overcome the at times sentimental contrivance of the contemporary material.
"Sarah's Key"
Grade: 3 out of 4 stars
Genres: Drama
Running Time: 102 min
MPAA Rating: PG-13
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