Elle s'appelait Sarah by Tatiana de Rosnay

While her narrative contains its own familiar story beats – she’s facing marital issues because she’s just learned she’s pregnant and her husband doesn’t want her to keep the child – she invests Julia’s pursuit of Sarah’s whereabouts with a conviction that never feels overblown.

In addition, Paquet-Brenner’s handling of Sarah’s plot thread doesn’t differ greatly from the countless previous films that have explored the Holocaust, although it does offer the unique twist that as opposed to the oppressors being Nazis, these were French soldiers doing the rounding-up.īut despite these demerits, the film gets its lifeblood from Scott Thomas. With its sombre style and somewhat melodramatic storyline, Sarah’s Key gives off a genteel, cultivated air that can come across as exceedingly dull and earnest. Believing that Sarah was not killed in the concentration camps, Julia goes on a hunt to determine what became of her. In the second, Julia (Scott Thomas) is a journalist living in Paris in 2009 with her husband and daughter who wants to write about the detainments to bring to light this little-known moment of shame in French history.īut her investigations turn up a disturbing discovery: The apartment her family is moving into (which has been owned by her husband’s family for more than 60 years) was previously occupied by a displaced Jewish family – Sarah’s. In the first, Sarah (Melusine Mayance) is a 10-year-old Jewish girl living with her parents and younger brother in Paris in 1942 when French authorities arrest them and other Jewish families to send them to Nazi prison camps. Sarah’s Key tells two stories simultaneously. The subject matter, the novel’s popularity, and Scott Thomas’s superb performance will all be factors in drawing in art-house audiences. Sharing superficial similarities with the distributor’s 2008 Oscar-nominated The Reader, the film is tentatively slated for a domestic release in 2011. Sarah’s Key will be opening in France on October 13, with the Weinstein Company securing US rights before the film’s Toronto premiere. Though ostensibly yet another film about the horrors of the Holocaust, director Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s adaptation of Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel uses the atrocity as a treatise on personal survival and new beginnings that is eloquently delivered by star Kristin Scott Thomas.Īs she did to great effect in I’ve Loved You So Long, Scott Thomas suggests worlds of sadness in her behaviour without ever expressing that discontent. A woman from the present becomes obsessed with tracking down a young woman from the past – for reasons even she can’t quite articulate – in Sarah’s Key, a staid but stubbornly involving drama.

Elle s'appelait Sarah by Tatiana de Rosnay