This is the second film I've seen in as many months about the round up and expulsion of French Jews during the second world war. The first was The Round Up and set predominantly during the second world war. Sarah's Key has two interlinked stories set during the war and in contemporary France.
At the heart of the film is the story of Sarah (Melusine Mayance). She is the young daughter of a Jewish family living in Paris and when the round up starts she locks her younger brother in a hidden cupboard so that he will be safe.
As her family are carted off first to a velodrome in Paris, then holding camps before the final journey to the concentration camps Sarah is desperate to get back to her brother and free him from the cupboard.
The contemporary story sees an American journalist, Julia (Kristen Scott Thomas) who is married to a French architect and living in Paris and is researching a piece on the round up. In the course of her research she discovers that her husband's family apartment, which he is renovating, belonged to a Jewish family who were sent off to the camps. Sarah's family in fact.
So as the story of Sarah and her attempts to get back to her brother unfold, Julia is slowly unearthing the story herself and the connection her husband's family have with that period of history.
It's nicely done but it is one of those films that you can't help feeling like the writers have come up with a good idea then gone beyond what is really necessary, diluting what is good source material.
The story of Sarah and whether she will or won't get back to her brother and whether he is or isn't still in cupboard, dead or alive is a compelling and deeply moving one. Julia's investigation into the story adds an extra layer of tension as she gets ever closer to discovering the truth.
*Potential spoilers* But does Julia really need to have marital and fertility problems? It is interesting to know what happened to Sarah after the war but does it need to go into quite so much detail about her family and the tension between Julia and the Sarah's grown up son just seems extraneous.
Sarah's key has some great moments and occasionally comes close to The Counterfeiters for dilemma and psychological trauma but its excess baggage weighs it down which is a shame. I'm going to give it 68%.
It's got 72% from users on IMDb, 58% from Metacritic and on Rotten Tomatoes it has 74% from critics and 84% from users.
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