- Sarah's Key
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Sarah's Key 
Theatrical release posterDirected by Gilles Paquet-Brenner Produced by Stéphane Marsil Written by Serge Joncour
Gilles Paquet-BrennerStarring Kristin Scott Thomas
Mélusine Mayance
Niels Arestrup
Frédéric PierrotMusic by Max Richter Cinematography Pascal Ridao Editing by Hervé Schneid Studio Hugo Productions Distributed by UGC Distribution Release date(s) 16 September 2010 (Toronto International Film Festival) Running time 111 minutes Country France Language French
EnglishBudget EU10,000,000[1] Box office $13,541,906 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 American-accented English and French.
Contents
Plot
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. 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 warn 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. The boy's father rushes in, and sees the decomposing body of Sarah's little brother. (The body is never shown onscreen.)
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, no longer able to handle what happened to Michel—for whose death she blames herself—Sarah 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 of 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'll 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.
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 self-absorbed husband and moved to New York City, she gives birth to a daughter.
The film begins in 1942, then abruptly switches to 2009, and after that, alternates between the past and the present. It ends with a scene in the present day in which William, having accepted the truth and contacted Julia, meets her for lunch and gives her additional information about his mother. At one point in the end scene, Julia has brought her toddler daughter along to the meeting. William asks the little girl what her name is, and she answers "Lucy". Later on, William tells Julia how sweet little "Lucy" is, and Julia laughs and tells him that "No, no, Lucy is her toy giraffe." (implying that the child misinterpreted William's earlier question, and thought he wanted to know the name of the toy giraffe, instead of hers) "So what did you name your daughter?" Julia looks at him tenderly: "Her name is Sarah." At the news, William breaks down in tears as Julia comforts him.
(French and French movie critics reaction needed)
Cast
- Kristin Scott Thomas : Julia Jarmond
- Natasha Mashkevich : Mrs Starzynski
- Arben Bajraktaraj : Mr Starzynski
- Mélusine Mayance : Young Sarah Starzynski
- Niels Arestrup : Jules Dufaure
- Dominique Frot : Geneviève Dufaure
- Frédéric Pierrot : Bertrand Tezac
- Michel Duchaussoy : Édouard Tezac
- Gisèle Casadesus : the Grandmother
- Aidan Quinn : William Rainsferd
- Maxim Driesen : Young Edouard Tezac
- Xavier Béja : André Tezac
- Céline Caussimon : Vel d'Hiv nurse
- Julie Fournier : Anna, the young lady escaping the Vel d'Hiv
- Jean-Pierre Hutinet : Village doctor
- Jonathan Kerr : Concentration camp police officer
- Matthias Kress : German officer investigating at the farm
- Sarah Ber : Rachel
- Karina Hin : Zoe Tezac
- James Gerard : Mike Bambers
- Charlotte Poutrel : Adult Sarah Starzynski
- Joe Rezwin : Joshua
- Kate Moran : Alexandra
- Paul Mercier : Michel Starzynski
- Serpentine Teyssier : Gardienne d'immeuble
- Simon Eine : Franck Levy
- Paige Barr : Ornella Harris
- Joanna Merlin : Mrs Rainsferd
- George Birt : Richard Rainsferd
- Vinciane Millereau : Nathalie Dufaure
- Sylviane Fraval : Bertrand's mother
- Dan Herzberg : red-haired police officer
- Nancy Tate : Alice
- Frédérick Guillaud : Young Richard Rainsferd
- Maurice Lustyk : Man with violin
References
External links
- Official Site
- Sarah's Key at the Internet Movie Database
- Sarah's Key at AllRovi
- Sarah's Key at the TCM Movie Database
Categories:- 2010 films
- French films
- French-language films
- Films based on French novels
- Holocaust films
- Pregnancy films
- The Holocaust in France
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