Dir. Gilles Paquet-Brenner, France, 2010, 110 mins, in English/French/some Italian and German with subtitles
Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup,
Review by Carol Allen
It is interesting that this film, based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel, comes out so soon after the release of The Round Up, as Sarah’s Key too draws on the same shameful episode in twentieth century history – the arrest, detention and deportation by the French police of Nazi occupied Paris’s Jewish population in July 1942. De Rosnay’s story, adapted for the screen by Serge Joncour and the film’s director Gilles Paquet-Brenner is though a fictional one built around the facts, which also takes the story into the present day.
Julia (Scott Thomas) is an American journalist married to a Frenchman and living in Paris. While researching a feature on the Vel’ d’Hiv Round up, she comes across the story of Sarah, a ten year old girl, who is arrested with her parents. To save her little brother, she locks him in a cupboard, making him promise not to move until she comes back for him and takes the key with her. Sarah’s story is intercut with that of Julia, who discovers that the apartment, which she and her husband Bertrand (Frédéric Pierrot) have been given by his parents, is the same one where Sarah and her family lived all those years ago. And as Julia, who is pregnant with a later life child she longs for but her husband doesn’t want, digs deeper into the story, she becomes ever more deeply involved with the mystery of Sarah and what became of her.
The film preserves the “page turning” quality of the novel, while translating it effectively into film terms, moving constantly and very clearly between the two time frames. Scott Thomas leads the audience into the revelation of Sarah’s story, providing the conscience of the film while at the same time involving us in Julia’s own life and dilemma. The scenes of the round up, the appalling conditions in the Velodrome d’Hiver, where the Jews are first held, with no access to food, water or toilet facilities, and later the internment camp at Beaune-la-Rolande, where mothers are forcibly separated from their children, are appropriately gruelling, though what really touches the heart are the unexpected moments of kindness and humanity, as in the policeman, who helps Sarah and another girl escape from the camp and most particularly Niels Arestrup as the gruff but kindly peasant farmer, who with his wife shelters Sarah from the Nazis. Mélusine Mayance, who plays the ten year old Sarah, is touching and totally convincing, while Scott Thomas is elegantly restrained as Julia, subtly communicating the inner turmoil of the character. In view of her very English quality though, it might have been better to have made the character English rather than American, but it is a small criticism.
The performances throughout serve the storytelling well – Pierrot as Bertrand, Michel Duchaussoy as his father and a sweet performance from 95 year old Gisèle Casadesus (so good in the title role of My Afternoons with Margueritte last year) as Bertrand’s grandmother, who has no idea about the tragic history of the apartment where she has lived happily and raised her children. And there’s a small but important and moving contribution from Aidan Quinn towards the end of the film, as the man who provides the last episode in Sarah’s story.
This is a good story and very well told.
love to know what you think of some of my work and music videos 
