“Sarah’s Key” (2010)

There are are risks involved in making a Holocaust drama.  Historical inaccuracy is obviously a no-no.  Tonal inappropriateness is another.  Then there’s the problem that even “Schindler’s List” could not quite solve: striking a balance between recognising that the vast majority of victims died and dramatising exceptions to that rule.

“Sarah’s Key” is a new French film that examines the complicity of the Vichy government in Nazi crimes.  It does so from a consciously modern point of view, inter-cutting between a present day tale of a journalist at a cross roads in her own life and a back story involving a young girl who managed to survive the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup of Parisian Jews in which over 13,000 were deported to death camps.

Impressively, melodrama and sermonising are kept to a minimum.  Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner might not demonstrate quite the same attention to detail as Roman Polanski does in “The Pianist” but he takes broadly the same approach, presenting inhumane acts without directly tugging at the audience’s heartstrings.  One overhead tracking shot of the squalid conditions in which detainees were forced to live in prior to their deportation sums the technique up: to depict an atrocity and its context is enough;  editorialising isn’t required.

The strength of “Sarah’s Key” is the way it examines the on-going fallout of the Holocaust, not only in terms of the guilt and depression felt by those who escaped the gas chamber but in the way history impacts on succeeding generations.

Kristen Scott Thomas continues her career renaissance, well cast as the journalist in the modern story even if she at times seems to struggle with an American accent.  The French supporting players are mostly solid, with 96 year old Gisèle Casadesus a stand out as the elderly grandmother.  Aiden Quinn also shows up, more competent actor than token Hollywood star.

There’s a well observed line of dialogue toward the end.  A young journalist compares apathetic popular reactions to the 1942 roundup with those of contemporary Americans watching Iraqi civilians being bombed on television.  It’s a measure of Paquet-Brenner’s restraint that “Sarah’s Key” neither absolves the French population of responsibility for war crimes nor necessarily suggests that later citizens would reacted any better in the face of fascist authority.  What his film does movingly show, however, is that deeds both good and bad always have consequences.