Sarah's Key features two alternating stories initially set in Paris, one concerning the fate of Sarah, a 10 year old Jewish girl and her family during the Nazi occupation in 1942 and another set in 2009 involving Julia, an American born French journalist, who has been researching the infamous Velodrome d'Hiver incident—a bicycle arena where thousands of French Jews were interned in squalid conditions after being rounded up by the French police upon orders of the Nazis.
When Julia discovers that the apartment she and her French born husband are about to move into, bequeathed to them by her husband's family, is the same apartment that belonged to a Jewish family that had been deported, her interest in the fate of French Jewry in World War II becomes personal—something much more than just one of her journalistic assignments. Before you know it, she pays a call to an expert Holocaust researcher who is able to provide her with the names of the deported family, which includes Sarah and her younger brother.
Perhaps the most gripping scenes in 'Sarah's Key' involve the deportation of the Jews during the infamous Parisian roundup. The horror is first aptly conveyed in the mother's panicked reaction to the French policeman's orders for everyone in the household to leave (including the children). As the police look for the husband (who is soon to be arrested when he returns home, unaware that the police have arrived), the two children sneak off into another room. Sarah inexplicably locks her younger brother in a closet and keeps the key, expecting soon to return and free him. Things get worse for the family when they're shipped to the Velodrome and they're forced to remain there for days on end, without toilets and in stifling heat. Frightened adults as well as children witness multiple suicides, as despairing deportees jump from the rafters. When the victims are transported to relocation camps, the full horror is conveyed when the parents are separated from their children and are driven off in trucks to death camps.
Like many comparable films created by German filmmakers, the scenarists appear to be ambivalent on the subject of homegrown complicity in the Holocaust. One scene illustrates this ambivalence—as the Jews are being deported, one French woman calls out from the window of her apartment, in substance, that the Jews are getting what's coming to them. But another man, in another apartment, yells to the woman, 'they'll come for you next'. Similarly, the villainous French police have one good apple amongst their ranks—the one who allows Sarah and her soon to be dying friend, to crawl under the barbed wire and make their escape from the relocation camp. And yes, there's even a quid pro quo when it comes to villagers: before taken in by the kindly couple, there was that gruff, homeowner who sends the children away without helping them. By mainly focusing on the 'righteous gentile' couple who saves Sarah, the film's scenarists may be giving the wrong impression that there was a equal balance between the bad and the good. In reality, the 'helpers' were few and far between, in occupied France.
While it was a bit of a stretch to accept the whole idea that Julia, a person who had already been researching Holocaust history in her job as a journalist, was now directly connected to a horror story involving her husband's family's apartment, the horror story itself proves to be far more contrived. I'm speaking of the whole idea of the kindly husband and wife who who decide to take Sarah back to the apartment to discover the fate of her brother. First of all, the husband wouldn't have had any trouble concluding that the child was dead already if he was still in the closet. So why would he allow Sarah to go up and open the closet, subjecting her to a trauma that haunted her for the rest of her life (until her suicide in 1955). Even more unconvincing is the idea that the husband and wife would have actually brought Sarah along to investigate what happened to the brother. How could they be so sure that the bribe would work when they were on the train? All the husband had to do was make the trip to Paris himself, bring the key and ask the new owner (Julia's husband's grandfather) to open the closet. As Sarah's discovery of her dead brother in the closet is the key moment in the film, and the events leading up to that moment are wholly implausible, the overall impact of the film is diminished.
Events depicted in the present day also tend to lessen the film's overall impact. Should we really care about Julia's fight with her husband over whether she should keep the baby? Perhaps if the husband was a more fleshed out character, the interaction between the two of them would have been more compelling.
Finally, 'Sarah's Key' asks the question, "what would you have done?" had you been under the yoke of Nazi occupation. It's instructive to compare the French and Danes during World War II. Denmark initially faced a much more benign occupation than France—the Nazis allowed them self-government and did not challenge them when they refused to enact laws against the Jews. But when the Nazis changed course in 1943 in Denmark, and a reign of terror did begin (similar to what happened in France), the Danes arranged for their Jewish population to escape by boat to neutral Sweden. In France, due to widespread anti-Semitism, there was little sympathy for the Jews to begin with and no such collective will emerged. The filmmakers, however, hint that the majority had no choice to act otherwise against the Nazis.
'Sarah's Key' does have some affecting moments particularly in its scenes involving the deportation of French Jews, but the film's central dramatic moment is too contrived to be believable.
When Julia discovers that the apartment she and her French born husband are about to move into, bequeathed to them by her husband's family, is the same apartment that belonged to a Jewish family that had been deported, her interest in the fate of French Jewry in World War II becomes personal—something much more than just one of her journalistic assignments. Before you know it, she pays a call to an expert Holocaust researcher who is able to provide her with the names of the deported family, which includes Sarah and her younger brother.
Perhaps the most gripping scenes in 'Sarah's Key' involve the deportation of the Jews during the infamous Parisian roundup. The horror is first aptly conveyed in the mother's panicked reaction to the French policeman's orders for everyone in the household to leave (including the children). As the police look for the husband (who is soon to be arrested when he returns home, unaware that the police have arrived), the two children sneak off into another room. Sarah inexplicably locks her younger brother in a closet and keeps the key, expecting soon to return and free him. Things get worse for the family when they're shipped to the Velodrome and they're forced to remain there for days on end, without toilets and in stifling heat. Frightened adults as well as children witness multiple suicides, as despairing deportees jump from the rafters. When the victims are transported to relocation camps, the full horror is conveyed when the parents are separated from their children and are driven off in trucks to death camps.
Like many comparable films created by German filmmakers, the scenarists appear to be ambivalent on the subject of homegrown complicity in the Holocaust. One scene illustrates this ambivalence—as the Jews are being deported, one French woman calls out from the window of her apartment, in substance, that the Jews are getting what's coming to them. But another man, in another apartment, yells to the woman, 'they'll come for you next'. Similarly, the villainous French police have one good apple amongst their ranks—the one who allows Sarah and her soon to be dying friend, to crawl under the barbed wire and make their escape from the relocation camp. And yes, there's even a quid pro quo when it comes to villagers: before taken in by the kindly couple, there was that gruff, homeowner who sends the children away without helping them. By mainly focusing on the 'righteous gentile' couple who saves Sarah, the film's scenarists may be giving the wrong impression that there was a equal balance between the bad and the good. In reality, the 'helpers' were few and far between, in occupied France.
While it was a bit of a stretch to accept the whole idea that Julia, a person who had already been researching Holocaust history in her job as a journalist, was now directly connected to a horror story involving her husband's family's apartment, the horror story itself proves to be far more contrived. I'm speaking of the whole idea of the kindly husband and wife who who decide to take Sarah back to the apartment to discover the fate of her brother. First of all, the husband wouldn't have had any trouble concluding that the child was dead already if he was still in the closet. So why would he allow Sarah to go up and open the closet, subjecting her to a trauma that haunted her for the rest of her life (until her suicide in 1955). Even more unconvincing is the idea that the husband and wife would have actually brought Sarah along to investigate what happened to the brother. How could they be so sure that the bribe would work when they were on the train? All the husband had to do was make the trip to Paris himself, bring the key and ask the new owner (Julia's husband's grandfather) to open the closet. As Sarah's discovery of her dead brother in the closet is the key moment in the film, and the events leading up to that moment are wholly implausible, the overall impact of the film is diminished.
Events depicted in the present day also tend to lessen the film's overall impact. Should we really care about Julia's fight with her husband over whether she should keep the baby? Perhaps if the husband was a more fleshed out character, the interaction between the two of them would have been more compelling.
Finally, 'Sarah's Key' asks the question, "what would you have done?" had you been under the yoke of Nazi occupation. It's instructive to compare the French and Danes during World War II. Denmark initially faced a much more benign occupation than France—the Nazis allowed them self-government and did not challenge them when they refused to enact laws against the Jews. But when the Nazis changed course in 1943 in Denmark, and a reign of terror did begin (similar to what happened in France), the Danes arranged for their Jewish population to escape by boat to neutral Sweden. In France, due to widespread anti-Semitism, there was little sympathy for the Jews to begin with and no such collective will emerged. The filmmakers, however, hint that the majority had no choice to act otherwise against the Nazis.
'Sarah's Key' does have some affecting moments particularly in its scenes involving the deportation of French Jews, but the film's central dramatic moment is too contrived to be believable.