Posted: 11/18/2011

Sarah’s Key

(2011)

by Joe Sanders

Available on Blu-ray and DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment on November 22

Sarah’s Key is actually a film about two very different stories. They happen 70 years apart and their connection is coincidental, but together they make for one amazing film. Kristen Scott Thomas (The English Patient) plays Julia Jarmond, a journalist writing a feature article about the mass deportation of Jews from France in 1942 to concentration camps in Germany. As it happens, Jarmond has just moved with her husband (Bertrand; Frédéric Pierrot) and daughter to the apartment that’s been in Bertrand’s family for generations. Julia quickly learns that their family moved into the home immediately after the Jewish family who was there got sent to a concentration camp. Julia spends the bulk of the film trying to track down any surviving members of this Starzynski family. Concurrently, the film flashes back to the 1940s to follow the life of Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance), a French Jew who hides her brother in a locked closet when the French police come to deport her and her parents.

It’s easy to criticize any holocaust film solely on the basis that so many are produced. But it’s a powerful and emotional historical period and something that the public obviously isn’t going to get tired of learning about any time soon. Sarah’s Keys stands apart from a “typical” holocaust movie in that it has very little to do with Nazi Germany and the systematic eradication of Jews in Germany. Instead, it tells the little-known story of the Nazi-sympathizing French government that shipped 76,000 Jews to camps over the course of a few days in 1942. This subtle change of perspective on these events is invaluable in making this film pop off the screen as something new and unique.

Kristen Scott Thomas always delivers a strong performance and this film is no exception. Watching her come to terms with her family’s past while she searches for any surviving members of the lost Starzynski family all work very well to further this interesting character. To heighten the drama of Julia’s internal struggle, we also get a developing conflict between her and her husband, Bertrand, when Julia learns she’s pregnant and Bertrand decides early on that he doesn’t want her to have the child.

Probably the best performance of the film comes from the young Mélusine Mayance, who plays the child version of Sarah Starzynski. Sarah’s story begins when the French police come to her family’s door to arrest them and deport them for being Jews. In the confusion, Sarah hides her younger brother in a locked cupboard in the hopes that she can return soon and liberate him; of course saving him from the horror and confusion of being arrested and forced to live in intolerable conditions. Not that being trapped in a locked cupboard is as glamorous as it sounds. Mayance’s performance would be remarkable for a much more experienced actress. She seems to fully understand the gravity of the time period she’s portraying and how they would define a real-life person living through these events.

Other very good performances from Niels Arestrup, Aidan Quinn, Charlotte Poutrel, and others come and go too quickly to be fully appreciated, but everyone helps contribute to the film’s contradicting ideas of intimacy and alienation.

The only special feature on the Blu-ray/DVD is a making of featurette. The film itself has some beautiful cinematography and other visuals and that might make it preferable on Blu-ray.

Joe Sanders is a playwright and college instructor in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has a Master’s degree in playwriting and a Bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Western Michigan University, where he currently teaches Thought and Writing.

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