The mass extermination of the Jews during WW2 still hangs heavily over the present. There is, for example, no way of even beginning to understand the stubbornness and complexity of current Middle East politics without appreciating that.
It’s hardly surprising the Holocaust continues to grip the imagination and indignation of filmmakers, including Jews who have grown up in the event’s shadow.
Filmmakers are still finding new ways to express at least some of that mass event’s immensity – whether via the outrageous revenge fantasy of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds; the soberness of Polanski’s The Pianist or Schloendorff’s The Ninth Day. And occasionally they’ve fallen flat on their faces while bizarrely being lauded for it (witness the obscene sentimentality of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful).
There is nothing grotesque about Gilles Paquet-Brenner French drama Sarah’s Key and neither is it just a routine melodrama filled with what can too easily be seen as genre clichés: cattle trains full of Jewish families, evil Nazi guards, et al. The film, based on a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, brings two fresh aspects to the subject. While there have been features that have focused on French collaboration under the Vichy regime, this is the first I recall where the men rounding up Jews to be taken to the camps are Gendarmes. While it’s hardly surprising the French police collaborated with the Nazis, the sight is nonetheless startling.
But what really makes this a persuasive addition to the sub-genre, its serious achievement, is the way that it interweaves the present and past so that they become indivisible. Its true subject is the way the past is ever-present if only we allow ourselves to see the thin veil dividing us from it.
In expressing this, the film follows two parallel stories which are given equal weight. The first concerns Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist in Paris who starts working on a magazine project researching the lives of Jews who used to live in the Marais – now a trendy area full of gay bars and boutiques, but pre-war the home to many Jewish families.
Simultaneously Julia’s architect husband (Frederic Pierrot) is renovating his old family home, also in the Marais. Curiosity and suspicion prompts Julia to do some extra research to find out who the owners were before his family moved into the flat during the early 1940s. As she suspected, the previous occupiers were Jewish – not that her husband is none too pleased at her pointed questions and insinuations. Let sleeping dogs lie, she is forcibly told. But she refuses, intensifying her attempts to find out if anyone from the family survived the Holocaust and if so, to track them down.
The second story is the one she is researching, concerning the fate of the apartment’s Jewish family during the early 1940s. The eponymous Sarah (Melusine Mayance) was 10 years old when the police dragged her and her parents away, initially locking them and many other Jewish families in the city Velodrome before hauling them to a transit camp. Sarah becomes obsessed with rescuing her young brother, who has been locked behind a panel in an attempt at saving him, and tries to figure a way to escape and return home to effect a rescue.
The scenes of confusion and panic as family members are separated from one another at the transit camp are filmed with a sense of urgency that makes the film feel closer to a documentary than the handsomely staged melodrama that it undeniably is. After this the two parallel narratives become increasingly entwined, so that the connections binding the living to those who have died become impossible to escape.
Parallel narratives can be hard to pull off in film. It’s often the case that one strand is more compelling than the other. When the film switches back and forth between different time-scales, our involvement can drain away as we struggle to readjust and revive our interest in the alternate story. What makes Sarah’s Key work so powerfully is the way the two strands build upon each other to become greater than the sum of the two parts.
