Sarah's Key (2011)

This is the second movie made from a book that I loved that I have seen this month and felt that the film was up to the task of conveying the emotional content of the book. This is in part due to the exceptional performance of Kristin Scott Thomas as an American journalist living in Paris in the early 21st century. This is the second French film that I have seen her play a lead role in recently (the first being 'I've Loved You So Long')--she plays a woman whose first language is English in both films, and seemingly effortlessly moves between the two throughout the film. I love that about the movie--the Germans speak German, the French speak French, and The Americans speak English. There are subtitles. It feels real. "Sarah's Key" goes back and forth between events in 2002 and what happened 60 years earlier during the city's infamous Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup of July 16, 1942, when French officials and police, not Germans, rounded up 13,000 of the city's Jews and herded them together for days in horrible conditions in one of the city's indoor bicycle-racing tracks before dispatching them first to a transit camp and finally to Auschwitz. The film on that July day in 1942 in the Marais district apartment of the Starzynskis, with the family being rounded up under frightening circumstances, 10-year-old Sarah (an exceptional Mélusine Mayance) impulsively instructs her younger brother to hide in the bedroom cupboard. She then locks him in, instructing him not to leave until she comes to get him (with unfortunate consequences). Thomas's character is married to a man whose great grandparents moved into the apartment after the Starzynskis are forcibly moved out--so that is the connection. The movie centers on Sarah, who miraculously escapes the fate of the rest of her family, and is raised in a family that both loves and protects her into adulthood. But she hasn't really escaped. She is hostage to her guilt, her remorse, and her losses. Thomas goes about finding her story, and breathing life into it, even at the expense of her personal life. The film is exquisite in it's attention to emotional detail, which is pitch perfect. In the final analysis, we aren't even sure what happened with Sarah but we recognize the devastating events of her childhood wore her out in adulthood. Jean Luc Godard said it best: "A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order." Sarah's Key is spectacular.