Sarah’s Key (2010): An honest depiction of the past?
Countless films have been made on the subject of the Holocaust and the effect of the Second World War on Europe. Few, however, strike a deeply emotional cord or can be said to be carefully accurate in regard to the events that took place at the time. Elle S’appellait Sarah (Sarah’s Key), a 2010 film directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, is a powerful film, but not necessarily due to its historical aspect.
Recounting the Vél D’Hiv roundup of 1942, in which thousands of Jewish families were forced to leave their homes to enter the Paris velodrome to then spend numerous days in inhumane conditions before being put on a train to Auschwitz, Sarah’s Key is tragic but not as heavy as other Holocaust films. Rather, Paquet-Brenner wants to focus our attention on the way in which the deportation was seen through the eyes of a child; Sarah. Granted, the young girl appears more like an adult child, but the aspects of responsibility and moral guilt that live in her are what characterise the whole film. Furthermore, the performance of Kristin Scott Thomas as Julia Jarmond, is sincere. Julia only seeks to find the truth about Sarah; she does not want to place unnecessary guilt on those who have not been completely honest with her.
From the start, the film is not hectic: from under the bed sheets, Sarah and her small brother Michel hear the loud knock on the door, and Sarah immediately wants to find out what is happening. Even in the velodrome, the families huddle together but no one truly lashes out at the confusion in their mind. On account of this, the film is not as truthful as it perhaps could be.
The unforgivable silence of the bystanders is later reflected in the modern-day ignorance of Julia’s co-workers; they do not even know of the Vél D’Hiv. Even in the transit camp where the children are kept and from which Sarah and another Jewish girl escape, no one makes too much noise. This allows the film to have a certain element of tranquillity and beauty: when Sarah manages to reach the French guard’s heart in her pursuit of escaping the camp, it is only a few words that allow her freedom. This freedom is then beautifully captured in the scene in which Sarah and her friend float with their heads out of the water in a dirty pond.
It can therefore be said that the film is perhaps too easy-going and loose on morality, while it busies itself with true inner quests. But this is not a bad thing. Because as Julia points out when she first strikes an interest in wanting to find Sarah and the former residents of her apartment in Paris, “How do you know what you would have done?” The film allows the grounding genuineness to be known: there is nothing we can do now; essentially, there is nothing we can say that will change things. We are only presented with a case of a survivor who had to live with the guilt. But even for her, it was too much.
Sarah’s Key is an emotional film, dealing with the case of a young girl growing up in a world where her childhood is completely different from her later life. It seeks to establish the importance of memories and their weight in the characters’ (namely Sarah) minds, and the inevitability to change them. An attempt at paralleling lives is made: Sarah too, like Julia, grew up to have a family of her own. But the films wants to make it clear that although Julia strives to find out as many details as she can about Sarah’s life, no one can truly understand unless, like Sarah, they lived through the time of unspeakable dread and desperation.
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