Decades later, the American-French journalist Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is married to a successful Frenchman named Bertrand Tezac (Frederic Pierrot), wangles an assignment from her editor to write a cover story on the Vel d’Hiv Roundup. Although she doesn’t at first know it, her in-laws, the Tezacs, are the family that moved into the apartment after the Starczynskis and little Sarah were forcibly vacated. Julia, though beset by family problems (her discovery of her own late pregnancy and the disinclination of Bertrand to take on late fatherhood) digs further.

SPOILER ALERT

She finds Sarah’s American relatives, finds out what happened to her, eventually finds Sarah’s son (Aidan Quinn). And she finds the key.

END OF SPOILER

This is partly sheer melodrama of course, partly a weepie. But it’s an interesting story and it grips you and moves you, especially at the beginning, during the roundup. Innumerable movie critics have complained that Julia’s personal problems are so heavily outweighed, in emotion and significance, by the Holocaust sections that it creates an imbalance. Of course it does. How could anyone’s marital problems, or everyday problems, or personal problems of any kind, possibly not be obliterated by spectacle of mass arrests and the Holocaust? But that doesn’t mean that the movie trivializes the history it recreates, either intentionally or not.

In Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, a much better movie than Sarah’s Key, the lovemaking and relationship of a French movie actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and her Japanese architect lover (Eiji Okada) are juxtaposed with images of the bombing and its aftermath at Hiroshima, and dialogues between the two about the mass deaths there — and later, there’s a long sequence of the journalist’s tragic WW2-era romance with a German soldier. Resnais doesn’t show us as much of Hiroshima in WW2 as Paquet-Brenner (working with de Rosnay’s text with his co-screenwriter Serge Joncour) shows us of the recreated Vel d’Hiv and its horrific aftermath. But how could that troubled romance in Hiroshima Mon Amour as well not seem small compared with the horrors of an atomic bomb wiping out a city?

What’s important in Sarah’s Key about the sections with Julia is not that her own family problems are in any way comparable to Sarah‘s, but that there are great changes wrought in Julia by the past history she unravels, a history little known to many of us, and even to Julia’s young newsmagazine co-workers. I’d never heard of Vel d’Hiv before and I’ll bet most of the American audience (and a lot of movie critics) hadn’t either — though the French audience probably knew more, even if  it wasn’t re-imagined with this intensity.

 The main point of Sarah’s Key is that evil is a part of history, it happens, and it destroys lives and goes on affecting them in many ways until we come to terms with it — that we shouldn’t  trivialize or forget it.  Julia can be somewhat self-righteous and unlikable. (I confess I disliked her a bit up until the end, when she actually criticizes some of her earlier behavior.) But she does empathize with Sarah and she has a sense of justice and she’s the one who finds and tells Sarah’s story, and, in a way, she reclaims her to life.

The movie tells a good story, sometimes implausible, but with that crystalline, impeccably visualized look and style that was typical of, say, Fred Zinnemann’s better movies — including his own World War 2 anti-Nazi remembrance story Julia. Zinnemann, though sometimes underrated by serious critics (maybe he won too many Oscars for their tastes), was a good director, an intelligent one, and a very good storyteller with good taste in material and subjects. (I love Hawks‘ Rio Bravo, which was made partly in response to Zinnemann‘s High Noon, but I love High Noon too.) And Paquet-Brenner is a good director as well.

By the way, the actors speak different languages in Sarah‘s Key, primarily French and English, but always believably. That’s always true of he bilingual Ms. Thomas of course, but Paquet-Brenner seems as comfortable working in two linguistic worlds as she is. We’ll hear more of him, and in our language. I hope we hear much more from Thomas, in English as well as French: the old world she seems to have so thoroughly conquered.

If there’s an imbalance in Sarah’s Key, it’s because our expectations may be raised so high by the sheer power of the Vel d’Hiv scenes. The image of this beautiful little girl, lost in the horrors of the Holocaust, trying so hard to save her little brother, haunts you. The movie isn’t great, but de Rosnay’s and Mayance’s Sarah is.

That’s the way it is with some films. Sometimes the parts or one part outweighs the whole. But if something is beautiful, or powerful, or memorable in a movie, as Sarah’s desperate quest is here, and it reaches us, as Sarah does here, it tends to makes the experience worth it. Here, it is worth it. That‘s the key. (Elle s’appelait Sarah.)

Extras: Documentary The Making of Sarah‘s Key.

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