DVD Reviews

Sarah's Key

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas
• Details: France / 111mins (15A).

Adapted from Tatiana de Rosnay's novel, Sarah's Key owes a dept of gratitude to Anne Holm's I Am David: little kid escapes a concentration camp to find her way home during WWII. Despite strong performances, the choppy narrative halts any possibility of fluidity and the rather obvious outcome gives the drama a TV Movie vibe.
To save her baby brother from the Jewish roundup of Paris by the French government in 1942, young Sarah (Mayance) locks him in a wardrobe. When she is separated from her parents, Sarah, because she has the key to the wardrobe, takes it upon herself to plan an escape of the camp and trek it across the country to home. Sixty years later journalist Julia (Thomas) plans to move into Sarah's house, but when she discovers the truth about the one-time owners she, out of guilt, researches a feature on Sarah's story...
There is a line near the beginning of Sarah's Key that indicates the trouble the story is going to get into later: when explaining the roundup of the Parisian Jews to the underlings at the magazine, an intern shakes his head at the cruelty of the Nazis. Thomas stops him with: "They weren't Nazis... They were French." If director Gilles Paquet-Brenner, who adapted the novel, left it at 'they weren't Nazis' the line, and the movie, would have had mystery and intrigue. Adding the pointless and obvious '...they were French' is indicative of the sometimes brainless plotting this drama will succumb to. Sarah's escape from the camp is almost hilarious: in broad daylight, and with a tower guard mere feet away, she manages to crawl under the fence and run into the open without being spotted. The director doesn't know when to call time either: Like Eastwood's Changeling, the film has a powerful climax (a scene that will stay in the memory for some time) but then inexplicably continues on for another forty minutes or so - forty minutes that are bereft of any kind of drama.
The perpetual flashbacks and flash-forwards kill any kind of momentum either plot could have, with Julia's plot proving to be the most troublesome. The plot meanders off point on so many occasions it becomes irritating, and Julia's motivation to get to the bottom of Sarah's story isn't strong enough to keep a narrative going.
It's not all bad, however. That memorable scene is touching and Kristin Scott Thomas is once again bang on form, backed up by a terrific turn from the young Mayance.

Review by Gavin Burke