Sarah’s Key

This review first appeared in the Sunday Star Times, 3rd April 2011

Long before her appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Kristin Scott Thomas was performing in French films and television plays, and in nearly 30 years has proven time and again one of the greatest and most versatile British actresses.  Along with quintessentially English roles in the likes of Gosford Park and The English Patient, Scott Thomas’s bilingual ability has garnered her lead parts in critically acclaimed French films.  Naturally, her French is accentless – the one exception being in the excellent I’ve Loved You So Long, for which she was actually required to sound like an Englishwoman returning to France after years away.

In Sarah’s Key (based on the novel by Tatiana De Rosnay) she plays Julia, an American journalist living in Paris (this time showcasing a subtly faultless American accent).  Julia stumbles upon a family secret that ties into a piece of history she has previously studied, that of the Vel d’Hiv round-up of more than 13,000 Parisian Jews in 1942 and their subsequent deportation, by their fellow countrymen, to the Nazi death camps.

The film flits between Julia’s contemporary search for a truth that risks upsetting her family and destroying her marriage, and the affecting historical story of a young girl (Sarah) separated from her family and carrying a terrible emotional burden which drives her own narrative.  Writer/director Gilles Paquet-Brenner does a good job of managing his two casts, the discrete settings and related plots.  The production design is spot-on, dropping you straight into the turmoil and uncertainty of war-torn Europe, with effective use of suffocating camerawork and, in particular, a sweeping overhead shot of the vélodrome where the Jewish families languish, frightened and ailing after days of mistreatment and neglect.  The film does not shy away from some shocking revelations, and the principal emotional punch is well-delivered, without being gratuitous or overdone.

Scott Thomas is, predictably, the heart of the modern story, but her co-stars in the telling of the war years are equally compelling.  Our young heroine Sarah (Mélusine Mayance) gets by on chutzpah rather than cutesiness, and Niels Arestrup (seen recently in last year’s A Prophet and Farewell) brings his artistic weight to the role of a kindly local who ensures Sarah’s wellbeing and eventual legacy.

While audiences may feel they have had their fill of Holocaust stories, what sets this apart is its particular French spin, and the implication of thousands of ordinary Frenchmen and women in the capture and death of their fellow citizens.  In 1995, President Chirac acknowledged the state’s involvement in Vel D’Hiv and called for France to face up to its past, so its relevance is still very real today.

The story spans seven decades and two continents, as Julia’s increasingly obsessive quest for the truth slowly reveals its answers.  The early revelations are handled well, though towards act three things get a bit clunky as she imposes on virtual strangers, lobbing questions at them over a cup of tea before racing to her next destination.

Perhaps also because of the strange casting of Aidan Quinn (who is no European, and no match for the nuanced Scott Thomas), the film starts to feel long.  However, we are engaged throughout and, though the book title is clumsy, overall the film’s adaptation is suitably elegant.

It didn’t hurt a bit, but is it really a Best Picture?

Well done, Kathryn Bigelow.

I loved Point Break back in the day (and even on DVD last week, nearly 20 years since I first saw it in the cinema and felt completely exhilarated). And I thought she did a superb job with the under-appreciated Strange Days (what a brilliant and ghastly concept! Angela Bassett an inspiration! and has Tom Sizemore ever been more sinister?? – this was pre-Heat, of course…). As much as I hate to play the “Go women directors!” angle, she sure can produce a good action flick – no question about it.

So then she was suddenly nominated for an Iraq war film, best director and best picture Oscars among others, up against her ex-husband, the polarising James Cameron. He was up for Avatar, as we know all too well, and the inevitable taking of sides began. I hadn’t seen The Hurt Locker (we only just got it here in the last couple of weeks) but I knew Avatar sure as heck wasn’t deserving of Best Picture, and so (playing the “Go women directors!” angle) I was happy to support Bigelow, sight unseen. After all, since when does the Academy reward truly excellent films or superlative film-making anyway? not often of late…

Well, I’ve seen it now. And let’s put aside the Best Picture and Director wins for the time being. The Hurt Locker is a good, well-made film – it’s gripping, gritty, well-acted, the script is largely simple and non-sentimental, the characterisation is sufficiently engaging that you do care about whether the bomb disposal team live or die, and there are some pretty exciting cameos from Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes (the latter eliciting a *gasp* of recognition and a frisson of excitement from this viewer – mopey Ralph, all tanned, tough and Alpha-Maled up!!).

Jeremy Renner is our main guy throughout, a slightly caricatured devil-may-care kinda soldier Staff Sergeant William James (well, that’s my 2 favourite boys’ names right there).  Will clearly relishes his role as the most successful member of the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) squad – he’s defused 873 bombs in his short career – and his attitude to the task at hand makes for incredibly exciting viewing.  Leave the fear and apprehension to the others in the team (a particularly nice performance from the little-known Brian Geraghty) – Will is seemingly fearless, preferring to discard the special armoured suit in favour of working in shirt sleeves once he establishes there is a high likelihood of failure anyway, so he’d rather die comfortable.

The set-pieces are all superbly crafted. The photography juxtaposes close-ups of the actual bombs, so that we understand the intricacies of removing wires and detonators, with wide shots that bring home the context of each suspenseful situation – local Iraqis watch from their balconies with curiosity rather than fear, people go about their commerce in the streets, while the EOD team stands tense, alert, mindful of the potentially devastating outcome.  To its credit, the film doesn’t overdo the jerky, handheld camerawork now emblematic of the Bourne school, yet the movement still brings you right into the action. Needless to say, the trick is in the editing – and to that end, every deployment keeps you gripped until Will James sits back in the truck and lights a cigarette, signalling all is well.

The film’s one difficulty is its ending. I sympathise somewhat with the writer – short of blowing up your protagonist and leaving us at a military funeral, how to round off over 2 hours of such drama? The answer is: drag us from the dusty heat of Iraq and throw us into Will’s claustrophobic rainy world “back home” with his wife and new baby. He struggles to reconcile the endless aisles of breakfast cereal with what he’s experienced at war, and following a slightly cringy and disappointingly banal monologue to his infant son, we see Will re-deployed to the Middle East, patently happy to be back doing what gives him purpose.

But Best Picture? Annoyingly, the Academy upped the shortlist to 10 films this year, not really leading the charge for separating wheat from chaff, but there you go. I was just so glad Avatar (in all its technical splendour, but laden with a rubbish script, story, characterisation, and all the other things that should really a Best Picture maketh) didn’t win. And given The Blind Side was also a nominee, clearly we weren’t shooting for the stars in 2009. The Hurt Locker is not quite Best Picture material in the way that No Country for Old Men, The English Patient and (my favourite) Silence of the Lambs were over the last 2 decades. But in the context of previous winning films, it’s actually pretty in keeping with the Academy’s taste. And I can’t honestly put one of the other 9 nominees as my preferred choice, so I guess I’ll just have to enjoy the film for its own merits, and hope for a more exciting, worthy Oscar race next March.