Sarah's Key

In the years since ‘Mississippi Burning’ was released, historical fiction has rightfully received a great deal of criticism. The liberties that Hollywood has taken with history on screen are legion, creating whole cloth out of the tattered fabric of seminal events. While a subject of great concern, let's leave this for another discussion at another time.

Other than the well awarded German drama ‘The Lives of Others,’ it’s hard to come by a film that respectfully incorporates history on a grand scale into the arc of the story.

Yet Sarah’s Key manages to be respectful, dramatic, and even realistic, without slinking back to maudlin or even seeming overwrought. It's tough, but not brittle.

Working through the present, in the form of a bold American magazine writer working for a small French publication, Kristin Scott Thomas takes the role created by novelist Tatiana de Rosnay, and provides meaning and purpose to her work as a journalist, while delving into the difficult questions that challenge, provoke, and often divide.

Scott Thomas wants extra space in her magazine to cover the story of the 60th anniversary of the little told Vichy French government’s round up of Parisian Jews at the Vel d’Hiv velodrome in July 1943. Over the course of her research, told through the film’s second story, and shot beautifully on different stock, she documents the repeated horrors inflicted on the Jews taken in, locked up, and then sent off to Nazi death camps.

But within the grand story, she becomes transfixed by one particular drama, involving a 10 year old girl, and her 4 year old brother, two victims of the Holocaust who manage to not appear on either death documents, or transfer documents, or anything else Scott Thomas unearths.

And within that research, and that back and forth of the story from at first 1943, to the present, we are provided a range of human emotions and characters, and a story that traverses time, continents, and even families.

Sarah’s Key will appeal particularly to those who feel compelled to bear witness on these kind of works. It goes much further, though, as a story of love and faith, of the human desire to learn the truth about history and family, and as a film that wisely avoids cliché even when that opportunity abounds.

This is one of those rare films in which the total of the film is far great than the sum of the individual performances, as impressive as they are, particularly that of young Sarah.

Though fiction, Sarah’s Key speaks to universal questions, acknowledges pain, suffering, and loss, and manages to take events from long ago in a world far away and make them engaging, and interesting, for our exceedingly modern world.