"Sarah's Key": Holocaust Movie Wrings Sentimentality from Atrocity

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Embarcadero Center Cinema

1 Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA 94111

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: Embarcadero

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Rated PG-13. Opens Friday at the Embarcadero.

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Exposing a little-known piece of Holocaust history — the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, in which French police arrested thousands of Jews in Paris in July 1942 — Sarah's Key dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality. The film toggles between the past — as 10-year-old Sarah Starzynski (Melusine Mayance) and her parents are taken from their Marais home and penned up in the Velodrome d'Hiver, a cycling arena in the 15th Arrondissement, before being sent to a nearby internment camp — and the present, focusing on Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist in Paris who's writing an article about the all-but-buried episode. In the course of her research, Julia discovers some uncomfortable truths about her French in-laws' connection with the Starzynski family; wading through the mawkish muck, particularly during plot threads involving her "miraculous" middle-age pregnancy and tracking down Sarah's adult son, the bilingual and normally unimpeachable Scott Thomas sounds as if she has learned a Yank accent via Rosetta Stone. Based on Tatiana de Rosnay's novel and co-written by director Gilles Paquet-Brenner and Serge Joncour, Sarah's Key is filled with the usual meaningless bromides, concluding with Scott Thomas' voiceover declaration: "When a story is told, it is not forgotten." This film vanishes from memory immediately.

 
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lillian
lillian

This review could not be more off base. I've just seen the movie with a number of friends....all of whom are history buffs, lovers of fine films, and good judges of bad ones. This was not a bad film....I would rate it excellent....this reviewer is either jaded or heartless. What planet is this reviewer from?

 

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