08/17/2011
Review by David Anthony
Childhood must be numbered highly among the casualties of carnage. Sarah’s Key illustrates that. In Occupied France, a formerly comfortable middle class Parisian Jewish family confronts a new dark dawn heralding horrors Hitler has unleashed.
They are to be among those rounded up overnight by willing French neighbors in a chapter in the history of the Holocaust unknown to many beyond the gates of Gaul.
Sarah’s Key begins in the present and works its way backward. It centers around Julia Jarmond, a crusading journalist with a social conscience and a curiosity about just how things came to be the way they are. These traits will not let her rest once she unlocks the sordid secret behind how her in-laws found a flat after France’s fall.
Kristin Scott Thomas is Julia, harrowingly haunted by the sinister silent specters of the past. Piece by piece she painstakingly reconstructs the shattering saga of Sarah Starzynski, an adolescent seized with her mother and father and turned over to the Nazis, by French collaborators. Sarah, fearing the worst, locked her younger brother in a closet for his safety, hence the title, Sarah’s Key. That symbol frames the film.
What unfolds through Julia’s indefatigable sleuthing, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the fate of Sarah. Sarah, played by Mélusine Mayance, evokes the image of each child who has had to crouch in the face of crimes against humanity, the world over. Sarah covers herself without cowering, astonishingly transforming herself into a survivor. The indissoluble links stitching Julia’s present to Sarah’s past knit the story together.
Last week, my film colleague Dennis Morton talked about Another Earth. While he covered many of the bases on that, I also wanted to weigh in on the side of this truly innovative endeavor. I, too, was really impressed by the maturity and sophistication of the plot, the extraordinary gifts of the youthful star, Brit Marling, and her co-star, William Mapother. Mike Cahill’s direction blends well with Marling’s co-writing in the story of Rhoda Williams, whose decision to be taken in by a starry night leaves the family of composer John Burroughs in ruins and his existence a life full of holes.
Marling’s Rhoda and Mapother’s John each possess magnetic qualities, released at the precise instant they struggle to contain and comprehend the intensity of their emotions. The conceit of the parallel planet, the doppelgänger stands as much for our psychological double as anything else. As Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip Pogo, so poignantly and often reminded us, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Lastly, even though it is and will be hard to track down, I want to put in a word for Project Nim, the documentary about research on chimpanzees which, while rooted in the realities of the seventies, nonetheless speaks to present and future audiences about the consequences of animal testing. I will have more to say about this in a different space, but I urge that it be seen, if not in theaters, rent a DVD or stream it. The true life tale of Nim Chimpsky and his human handlers, directed by James Marsh who gave us Man on Wire, was inspired by Elizabeth Hess’s 2008 volume, The Chimp Who Would Be Human (and even Matthew Broderick’s Project X ). It deserves to be seen and discussed at length. It is about language, humans and chimps. Not perhaps since the Scopes Trial has there been a more compelling juxtaposition of the three.
For the KUSP Film Gang, this is David Anthony.