| Sarah's Key | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Gilles Paquet-Brenner |
| Produced by | Stéphane Marsil |
| Written by | Serge Joncour Gilles Paquet-Brenner |
| Starring | Kristin Scott Thomas Mélusine Mayance Niels Arestrup Frédéric Pierrot |
| Music by | Max Richter |
| Cinematography | Pascal Ridao |
| Editing by | Hervé Schneid |
| Studio | Hugo Productions Studio 37 TF1 France 2 Cinema Canal+ TPS Star France Televisions Kinology Ile de France |
| Distributed by | Anchor Bay Entertainment The Weinstein Company UGC Madman Entertainment StudioCanal UK |
| Release date(s) | 16 September 2010 (Toronto International Film Festival) |
| Running time | 111 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French English |
| Budget | EU10,000,000[1] |
| Box office | $21,118,093 |
Sarah's Key (French: Elle s'appelait Sarah) is a French drama starring Kristin Scott-Thomas and follows an American journalist's present-day investigation into the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (where French police in German-occupied Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942 rounded up 13,152 predominantly non-French Jewish emigres and refugees and their French-born children and grandchildren, who were then shipped by rail to Auschwitz where they were murdered). It tells the story of a young girl's experiences during these events, vividly illustrating the willing, and even enthusiastic, participation of the French bureaucracy, including the Paris police, French Secret Service, and French army in aiding and abetting this Nazi persecution and the plundering by the Germans and French of the victims' property. It is also a story of how a farmer and his wife, and by extension a number of French country people, hid and protected Jews from Vichy authorities, the Germans, and French collaborators, at great risk to their own lives. It is an adaptation of the novel Elle s'appelait Sarah ("Her Name Was Sarah") by Tatiana de Rosnay and has been critically well-received, currently holding a 73% rating on the film review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.[2] Although British, Scott-Thomas delivers her English dialogue in an American accent, but for most of the film she speaks fluent French as she is Anglo-French. She has done many Anglo-French movies in French, and received a César Award nomination for her compelling performance in this role. In the movie she is married to a Frenchman and their daughter speaks both French and American-accented English.
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The film develops between the years 1942 and 2009, alternating between the past and the present.
In 1942, 10-year-old Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance) denies to the authorities carrying out the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup that her little brother Michel is at home, and locks him in a hidden closet. She tells him to stay there and wait until she returns. She takes the key with her when she and her parents are transported to the Vélodrome d'Hiver by the Paris Police and French Secret Service where they are held in inhuman conditions. Some French neighbours cheer the roundup while others jeer and say "They will come for you next."
The deportees are transferred to the Beaune-la-Rolande, the transit deportation detention camp, in squalid conditions and burning heat, in cramped quarters without adequate water or toilet facilities. First the men then the women are deported to the extermination camp in Auschwitz, and the children have to stay after being forcefully and cruelly separated from their mothers by the Paris police. Sarah tries to escape with a friend, Rachel, after noticing a small hole in the ground underneath a fence. A sympathetic Paris police guard, Jacques, whom Sarah wins over by calling by name, and convincingly begs to let them go so she can save her brother, hesitates but finally agrees, and lifts the barbed wire over the hole to let them out as he smiles sympathetically.
After searching for a safe place, exhausted, Sarah and Rachel, fall asleep in a dog house at a village home where they had originally been rebuffed. In the morning, they are discovered by its owner. Realizing who they are, he and his wife decide to help them. Rachel is dying, and when they call attention to the sick girl by calling in a doctor, a skeptical but implicitly sympathetic German officer asks them if they know anything about a second child and warns them of the dire consequences of hiding Jews—but makes no further inquiries. Rachel's body is taken away, while Jules and Genevieve, the elderly couple, hide Sarah in the attic. Days later they take her back to her family's apartment building in Paris. Sneaking past the concierge, Sarah runs up to her apartment, knocking on the door furiously. A boy, twelve years old, answers. She rushes in to her old room, past the boy, and unlocks the cupboard. Horrified by what she finds, she starts screaming hysterically.
After the war, Sarah continues to live with the old couple on the farm, together with their two grandsons, who treat her like their own granddaughter/sister, until she is 18. In letters, the couple describes Sarah's sadness and melancholy. When she turns 18, though, she moves to the United States, hoping to put everything that happened behind her, using the name Dufaure, the surname of the elderly couple. She gets married and has a son, William, although she stops corresponding with Jules and Genevieve soon after being married. When her son is 9, Sarah— no longer able to handle what happened to Michel, for whose death she blames herself— commits suicide by driving into the path of a truck, although her son had always been under the impression that her death was an accident.
In the present, the French husband of journalist Julia (Kristin Scott-Thomas) inherits the apartment of his grandparents (his elderly father was the boy who opened the door to Sarah in August 1942). Having previously done an article on the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup, Julia finds her interest piqued when she learns that the apartment came into her husband's family at about the time of the Roundup, and she begins to investigate what happened 65 years earlier. Her father-in-law, knowing the back story and wanting to protect his elderly mother (who had been the wife of the couple who took possession of the seized apartment) from knowing the truth, resents Julia's unwelcome prying, but realizes he will have to bring her in on the story to keep control of it, and tells her what he knows. Having got much of the story, she goes on an obsessive quest to find any trace of Sarah, eventually learning (in Brooklyn) of her death and finally locating William (in Italy). She meets with him and asks him for information about his mother, but learns to her surprise that William does not know his mother's history or even that she was a Jew, believing only that she had been a French farm girl. Listening in amazement to what Julia has uncovered, he refuses to believe it, flatly rejecting the story and brusquely dismissing Julia. Later, everything is confirmed by his dying father, who finally tells him the whole secret story of Sarah's background, including what led to his mother's suicide.
Meanwhile Julia has unexpectedly and joyously discovered that she's pregnant, having given up hope of a second child after years of fertility treatments and unsuccessful attempts to conceive, but her husband flatly disagrees that they should have another child at this point in life. He makes it clear that he wants her to have an abortion, saying he is too old even though he cherishes their teenaged daughter, Zoe. She hesitates about getting an abortion, and ultimately keeps the child. Later, having divorced her husband and moved to New York City, she gives birth to a daughter.
William contacts Julia and meets her for lunch and he gives her additional information about his mother. Julia has brought her toddler daughter along to the meeting. William believes that the little girl's name is Lucy, but as it turns out Lucy is her toy giraffe, when her real name is Sarah, which moves William very deeply.