Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist in France, hunting down a story that’s proving elusive. She’s trying to find evidence — photographs, written accounts — of the mass roundup, and later deportation to Auschwitz, of Jews in occupied Paris. One of her colleagues is puzzled by her problems. “I thought the Germans documented everything,” he says of the Nazis who had no shame about their crimes. Her reply shocks the young man: “It wasn’t the Germans. It was the French.” “Sarah’s Key” shows, in stark scenes, that shadowy story, one that many of the French would prefer to forget. We all know that there were collaborators amid the occupied, from France to Holland. But some people don’t realize just how cooperative — sometimes enthusiastically so — non-Germans could be. In July 1942, some Parisians sent thousands of their fellow citizens to their deaths. At Auschwitz, some French Jews starved, some were experimented upon, some were sent to the gas chambers. Few survived. Of the 42,000 Jews sent to Auschwitz from across France in a single year, 1942, only 811 returned.
Julia learns about one of the arrested families almost by accident. Her husband’s parents have given them the Paris apartment that’s been in the family for decades — since 1942, in fact. Looking through records and talking to those who remain, she pieces together Sarah’s story. Sarah Starzynski (Melusine Mayance) is taken away, along with her mother and father. The 10-year-old understands that something is wrong, and locks her 4-year-old brother Michel into a wardrobe, telling him to stay there until she comes back for him. Only later, at the Vel’ d’Hiv, the velodrome in which her family and thousands of others are held in disgusting conditions, does she realize what she’s done. In the days that follow, she has one goal: to get back to the apartment and keep her baby brother from dying in that lonely closet.
| ON SCREEN |
| ‘Sarah’s Key’ |
| » Rating: 3 out of 5 stars |
| » Stars: Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance |
| » Director: Gilles Paquet-Brenner |
| » Rated: PG-13 for thematic material including disturbing situations involving the Holocaust |
| » Running time: 111 minutes |
Young Mayance is riveting. She has a lot to do: carry the film, show a range of emotions, and make real the Holocaust for those who consider it just history to be found in the pages of books. She does it all, and then some. Scott Thomas is moving, as usual. But her story — which involves a pregnancy her husband wants her to terminate — ends the film on an unsatisfying note. The frame story is helpful in that it allows the writers to give explanations in the present for what’s happening in the past. And it’s engaging, until the very end, when it offers a weak version of the often-used trope of the circle of life and death.
But this heartbreaking film is still worth watching — especially for those who think the only inhumanities in World War II Europe were committed by members of the Nazi Party.
