Sarah's Key (2010)

Films about the holocaust are always grim, but the French production Sarah's Key adds a couple of twists that increase the stress.

The story begins in Paris in the summer of 1942 when the collaborationist Vichy government of France launches a round up of Jewish families. And here is the first cruel twist. It's not German troops breaking down doors, it is the Parisian police force, ever polite in its brutality. The second twist is more harrowing. Hearing the crashing on the front door, 10-year-old Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance) stuffs her younger brother into a secret closet (camouflaged as part of the bedroom wall) and locks the door.

Sarah and her parents are herded with thousands of other Jews into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, an indoor cycling arena, and left there without food, water or toilets. Here, Sarah's overarching struggle begins. She must rescue her brother.

From here on, Sarah's story is inter-cut with episodes from the present day when French-American investigative journalist Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) and her architect husband start to renovate the apartment once occupied by the Starzynski family. Learning of the sad history of the "Vél d'Hiv", Julia starts digging into the apartment's history and tracing the fates of Sarah and her family.

The first two thirds of the film focus on Sarah's struggle. Separated from her parents, she seeks to escape from an internment camp and get back to Pari. As we follow her, we also watch as Julia discovers that, while both the adult Starzynskis died during the war, there is no record of what happened to Sarah and her brother.

And here is the dramatic oddity of Sarah's Key. The culmination of Sarah's quest occurs at about the 75-minute mark of this 111-minute film. The half-hour coda is necessary to tie up loose ends such as the fate of Julia's troubled marriage and the joys and disappointments of her search for Sarah. But the tension that carries the first two acts is lost.

Despite that loss, Sarah's Key packs an emotional wallop that will stay with you after you leave the theatre.

So its weak reception in the United States (it grossed just over $100,000 on just five screens when it opened there) is dispiriting. Perhaps the U.S. fear of subtitles is to blame: a good two-thirds of the film is in French with English subtitles. In fact, I suspect that writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner could have made the entire film in French, and that making Julia bilingual was his attempt to lure an American audience.

Fmovies: In July, 1942, the French Police breaks in the apartment of the Jewish Starzynski family and arrest them in the Velodrome of Vel' d'Hiv and then in a local concentration camp with other Jewish families. The ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance) hides her little brother Michel in a closet in her bedroom to escape from the police officers but she does not succeed on giving the closet key to a neighbor to rescue her brother. When her parents are transferred to a German concentration camp, Sarah flees from the French guards with another girl and they meet the family of Jules Dufaure (Niels Arestrup) that help her to return to Paris to rescue her younger brother.

In 2009, the American journalist Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) and her French husband Bertrand Tezac (Frédéric Pierrot) plan to reform his apartment in Paris to live with their teenage daughter. Julia is assigned to write an article about the notorious deportation of French Jews to German concentration camps in 1942. During her investigation, she learns that the apartment of her husband's family belonged to Sarah's family. She becomes obsessed by Sarah's life and to find the fate of the little girl.

I have just bought the Blu-Ray "Elle s'appelait Sarah", a.k.a. "Sarah's Key", and I found it a perfect movie about a shameful and not divulged period of France's history in World War II. The writer Tatiana De Rosnay has written a magnificent novel and Serge Joncour and Gilles Paquet- Brenner have written an engaging screenplay. The director Gilles Paquet- Brenner made a heartbreaking film that is never corny.

Kristin Scott Thomas is one of the best contemporary European actresses and she has another awesome performance in the role of a flawed, stubborn and selfish character that speaks perfect English and French and becomes obsessed to discover the truth about her husband's family. Her charm and elegance is impressive for a forty-nine-year-old woman. But the girl Mélusine Mayance "steals" the movie in the role of Sarah. The cinematography and music score are beautiful and costumes cover different periods and locations. My vote is ten.

Title (Brazil): "A Chave de Sarah" ("The Sarah's Key")

Gilles Paquet-Brenner's "Elle s'appelait Sarah" ("Sarah's Key" in English) focuses on an American journalist (Kristin Scott Thomas) trying to find a French-Jewish girl who got rounded up by the Vichy government but escaped the camps. So, the journalist travels from place to place to try and learn what became of Sarah, and the full story of Sarah's locking her brother in a closet so that he wouldn't get arrested. The main point that the movie makes is not only the links that we have to past incidents, like the apartment that the journalist buys, but that atrocities require complicity. In this case, France's Vichy government was perfectly happy to assist the Nazis in the genocide against anyone whom the Nazis considered inferior.

Does the movie have any downsides? Well, maybe jumping back and forth between the present and the past is a little confusing, but it doesn't really drag the movie down. To be certain, I had never heard of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup before seeing "Sarah's Key". The main that is that this is part of history, it and needs to get told so that it never happens again. Really good movie.

Sarah's Key fmovies. 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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The movie deals with a harrowing episode in European history in a convincing fashion. It cleverly shifts from the past to the present, all the while building towards a tidy conclusion that ties up most of the loose ends, but leaves the audience guessing about the possible future of some of the main characters.

I was slightly disappointed that a few of the present day scenes were a little too frivolous for a movie that was built around such a tragic episode. However some good may come from this if it makes the movie more accessible to the younger audience, who might not be aware of all of the horrors of Jewish persecution during WW2.

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.