Sarah’s Key

Film (2010)

Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner
Screenplay by Serge Joncour and Gilles Paquet-Brenner
Based on a novel by Tatiana De Rosnay

With: Kristin Scott Thomas (Julia Jarmond), Mélusine Mayance (Sarah Starzynski), Niels Arestrup (Jules Dufaure), Frédéric Pierrot (Bertrand Tezac), Michel Duchaussoy (Édouard Tezac), Dominique Frot (Geneviève Dufaure), Natasha Mashkevich (Mme Starzynski), Gisèle Casadesus (Mamé), Aidan Quinn (William Rainsferd), Sarah Ber (Rachel), Arben Bajraktaraj (M. Starzynski), Karina Hin (Zoé), James Gerard (Mike Bambers), Joseph Rezwin (Joshua (as Joe Rezwin)), Kate Moran (Alexandra)

Kendall Square Cinema
Cambridge, MA

Two narratives separated by sixty years weave together here.

In the present, Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist married to a Frenchman and living in France, investigates an historic event suspiciously associated with the new apartment she and her husband are buying – the capture and export of Jews by the French Vichy government in 1942 in what came to be known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup. (Over 10,000 Jews were rounded up; 8000 were sent to German concentration camps.)

The associated narrative, set in Paris in 1942, depicts the personal history she seeks to discover. It focuses on the Jewish Starzynski family – who inhabited the apartment in question – and the effect upon them by the Vel d’Hiv Roundup. The eponymous key of the title refers to a key to a closet – hiding something extremely precious – which Sarah, a young girl at the time of the roundup, keeps in her possession.

The two halves of this interesting drama differ significantly in the quality of delivery. The historic drama is expertly rendered, full of feeling and sense of signficance. In the contemporary drama, apart from Kristin Scott Thomas’ compelling depiction of the journalist, the rendering is, by and large, uncompelling, and occasionally jarringly stilted. If the filmmakers were to have told the historic story more completely, with a less tortured contemporary wrapper, it would have made a better package.

However, most especially for its highly effective dramatization of the Vel’ d’Hiv incident, the film is very much worth seeing. I had not known many details about the French government’s complicity in rounding up Jews in the 1940s nor about this particularly grave example of it; Sarah’s Key brought the issue and the incident very much to life for me.

– CM