Review: ‘Sarah’s Key’
1. I don't trust movies in which an intrepid journalist becomes obsessed with a figure from the past and investigates their life, inevitably finding parallels with their subject's larger story and their comparatively insignificant one. It worked for "Citizen Kane," but now it's mostly used as a lazy narrative device, a way for a movie to tell a period story while still letting an audience know that it's OK, we've got plenty that you can relate to now, worry not. Inevitably, the modern-day journalist's story isn't nearly as interesting as the one he/she is investigating, because, hey, journalists aren't that interesting! That's why they're journalists rather than the people journalists write about. (These days journalists mostly write about themselves, but we don't have time for that discussion right now. Ask your mother.) You end up watching the journalist's scenes and waiting for them to hurry up and end, so you can get back to the story they're looking into in the first place; everyone would have saved a lot of time and effort if they'd have just told the period story in the first place. Let's just say "Casablanca" wouldn't be improved by a side story about a reporter who finds a picture in his late grandmother's dresser of a cynical looking guy in a fedora posing in front of his nightclub, and tries to discover who that guy was. It's a framing device in which the frame just gets in the way. (Think "Julie and Julia," or "Velvet Goldmine.")
2. "Sarah's Key" is a classic example. The film tells two stories. The first, the moving (if somewhat rambling) one, tells the story of Sarah (played by a lovely, determined 11-year-old named Mélusine Mayance), who, along with her parents, is evicted from her home after the German invasion of France. As (French) authorities round up her Jewish family and transport them to an internment facility and later the labor and death camps, she, in the heat of the moment, locks her brother in a closet and tells him to hide and wait until she comes back. We then follow the rest of her life, as she is taken to a camp, escapes, returns to the apartment and then deals with the aftermath of her split-second decision. This is a moving story -- if a bit derivative; the horrific immediate decisions innocent people were forced to make during Nazi rule is well-tread dramatic territory -- that we keep wishing the movie would stay focused on, rather than hopping back to the present day. This is the story we're here to see.
3. Alas, though, we instead spend half the movie with Julia Jarmond, an American journalist now living with her family in France, who has written about the plight of French Jews before and, as luck would have it, happens to be married to the man whose family took over the apartment when Sarah's family was evicted from it 60 years earlier. Obsessed with residual guilt, she determines to find out what happened to Sarah after the war, to the point that she even tracks down her family, many of whom know nothing of her story. This is fine, but then we get bogged down with Julia's story, more specifically, a surprising late-in-life pregnancy that her husband wants little to do with. This isn't particularly compelling, because the movie doesn't invest much in the husband, the family or even Julia's work. Kristen Scott Thomas is a splendid, oddly underused actress, but she doesn't really have a character to play here, try as she might. It's an awfully bad sign when you are cheering for an actress like Thomas to get off the screen.
4. The movie also spends a lot of time lecturing to the audience, specifically about the culpability of French leaders, and French citizens, in the deportation and depths of tens of thousands of Jews. This is not a story I was aware of -- at least not specifically, though "all, in their own way, were guilty" is a quiet subtext of most movies about the persecution of Jews during World War II -- and to make sure I never forget it, "Sarah's Key" allows countless modern-day characters to pontificate on it to no end. It gives the whole proceeding the feel of a message movie, more interested in shining a light on an underpublicized historical event rather than one invested in the personalities involved and telling their story. And it tiptoes to edge of being truly prosecutorial of today's French society -- pointing out how many French citizens still benefit today from what the country did to its Jews 60 years ago -- before retreating into a safe place that's all about the very modern construct of self-actualization. Even poor, tortured Sarah, she ends up being used as a prop for her son's re-discovery of himself, and Julia learning to love her baby and love herself. We're sure she's happy for you guys, but she's still kinda dealing with her own problems, thanks.
5. "Sarah's Key" has its moments -- there's an extremely touching scene involving an elderly couple who comes across Sarah and a friend who have escaped from a camp -- but it never quite finds the right balance between the grave consequences of its period scenes and the relative small beans of the present-day ones. Midway through the film, the true definition of the movie's title is revealed in a scene that's so harrowing that the film never recovers; every scene from them on just seems so silly. I mean, I'm sorry you're having troubles with your husband and your desire to have a late-in-life baby ... but lady, Sarah was part of the Holocaust. No one wants to hear about your marital issues. Good luck with them, though.
Grade: C
