Sarah’s Key (Gilles Pacquet Brenner, 2010): France

Reviewed by Dorothy Littlejohn at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2011

Sarah’s Key with Kristin Scott-Thomas (I’ve Loved You So Long, The English Patient) and directed by Gilles Pacquet Brenner, poses the question to me, will the truth set you free or will it be an impediment?

The story, based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel of the same title, is about a woman, Julia, who is doing research on the Holocaust in France at a time when the French Police were rounding up Jews and herding them to concentration camps. Julia finds a family to concentrate her story around and then things get complicated.

That family includes Sarah, a child who, when the French Police come knocking on the door, hides her little brother in a secret closet, promising him she will return to unlock the door “soon”. The rest of the film intertwines Sarah’s quest to return and rescue her brother with the story of Julia’s life investigating Sarah’s story.

There are many components to the movie that give pause for several themes: the search for truth and how that affects people; the question of what would you do when you witness a bunch of people being rounded up in your neighborhood and sent to who know’s where; the question of how working in a career defines our moral values.

The story takes place in several countries cutting across cultural lines of Julia’s family and extended family. The dismal colors and crude lighting of the 1942 scenes contrasts sharply with the light, airy colors and structures with lots of glass and see-through buildings. This suggests, perhaps that the modern era is more transparent, holding fewer secrets. Yet even in Julia’s modern office in New York with it’s huge windows, she asks her co-workers about people turning a blind eye to the rounding up of Jews. “What would you do?” she asks. Someone says, “It’s like the US attack on Iraq”. That when the US goes to war nobody stops it. There was little applause from the audience of the Arlington Theatre at this point, a very minor effort.

My Jewish friend tells me he was raised to speak out against injustice in order to prevent the Holocaust from happening again. But the issue raised in the movie is, people do turn a blind eye to man’s inhumanity to each other, even to this day, even the audience watching the movie.

This is a very thought provoking movie.