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Key to the past

The much acclaimed adaptation of Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel, Sarah’s Key, tells the story of a little girl with a heavy secret. In Paris, July 1942, Sarah and her family are callously wrenched from their home, arrested amidst 13,000 other Jews…

Sarah’s Key

France: cornerstone of modern philosophy, home of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Rights and of the Citizen, the nation of great art, on whose ground stomps leading fashion, class, and decadence…

Yet amidst the beauty and ease, scratched on memorial walls, and nestled in a Parisian closet lay a nation’s taboo– their darkest moment of shame. “The soil of France does not lie”, the officials had said, yet from beneath the veneer rose an inconvenient fetor– a dark and horrific hush, an event which, would rather quickly be forgotten.

The much acclaimed adaptation of Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel, Sarah’s Key, tells the story of a little girl with a heavy secret. In Paris, July 1942, Sarah and her family are callously wrenched from their home, arrested amidst 13,000 other Jews by the French police. Protecting him in a moment of seeming clarity, Sarah locks her younger brother in a secret cupboard, thinking it to be minutes before her return. “It’s a game”, she assures, promising to come fetch him. As Sarah is taken further from her home she clutches the key to herself, grounded amidst chaos, adamant she would return for little Michel.

Sixty-seven years later, American-born journalist Julia Jarmond (Kristen Scott Thomas) investigates the notorious Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, an event where 13,000 Jews were arrested and gathered for five days in Velodrome d’Hiver, amidst stifling heat, lack of sanitation, and little food or water. As Julia begins the investigation with almost bland professionalism, she stumbles across a family secret that links her personally and inextricably to the reality of Sarah Starzynski. Yet in unraveling the past she finds herself entangled, as families, pasts, times and decisions become affected and intertwined.

Visually juxtaposing Sarah’s chaos with Julia’s relative comfort, director Gilles Paquet-Brenner draws attention to the ease and absentmindedness of the 21st century; the viewer is completely drawn in as he seeks to speak for one amongst a silent majority that would rather not know. There are memorable scenes of panic, and horror. Impressionistically captured in hand-held, the separation of mothers and children at the Beaune-la-Rollande camp is chilling. Dust, skirts and boots clash as children are violently wrenched from their mothers, the scene is filmed at a child’s eye-level, and the viewer is almost there. Inasmuch as horror can be conveyed in two senses, it is sequences such as this that wholely absorb, as the humanness, the sameness, spanning beyond time and culture.

Sarah’s Key is a film that confronts the blind eye, the naïvety of newsfeed and the gulping back of unpleasant realities. The film is withheld, yet not stoic. There is a sense of resilience and of forward motion, in-step with a nation whose story is marred with violence and tragedy. In seeking reverberant humanity, Gilles Paquet-Brenner evades figures and statistics to apply a very personal reality to one name, turning this New York Times bestseller into a film that is not quickly forgotten.

One of the most touching and memorable displays of this notion of humanness is as little Sarah is caught escaping from the Beaune-la-Rollande camp. She thrusts out her hand to the guard in introduction, remembering his kindness to her before the war. Moved, he jerks the barbed wire fence up in his hands, instructing them urgently to run. As the memory of Sarah briefly pierces through the dull fuzz of brainwash and propaganda, the guard is left examining his bloodied hands, poignant in his revelation.

Perhaps the dullness of history is in the cardboard taste of facts. The names with no faces; the numbers, statistics, the dates with abstract events…A good history teacher is a good story teller; a good story teller knows that connections need to be made, heart strings reverberated, and that the common threads of humanity begin to weave into our own realities. And as the little girl in the red dress (Schindler’s List), and the Boy in the Striped Pajamas drew in thousands, it is little Sarah with the heavy key– the story of one, the humanity of one which orients the weight of the millions of other ones back onto minds and hearts.

Written by Emma Schoombie 6 March 2011.


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