Sarah's Key (2011)

Simply A Masterpiece

Just perfect...

best movie i've ever seen.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

'Sarah's Key' is a well written and well made film that takes on a different holocaust story, combining historical and modern day events. To start with the positives - there were some strong acting performances, especially from the young actress who played Sarah, and the plot was strong and interesting enough.There were a few things that I didn't particularly like, mainly the constant cutting from one story to the other, which I thought took a lot away from the initial story of Sarah. Just when you feel you're getting into one story, it cuts away to other and loses the impact it could have had.I've seen plenty of holocaust movies and whilst this one attempts to do things differently, it just doesn't stand out.

I finally saw Sarah's Key and I will say that its an excellent film. Kristin Scott Thomas was great as usual, but the real star was Melusine Mayance who played the young Sarah. She was phenomenal and an actress to keep an eye on in the future. I haven't read the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, but it's possible the film could have taken several different directions. The time shifts between 1942 and 2009 did not bother me, but I preferred the scenes with Mayance over the scenes with Thomas. Others have commented that the shifts between the two stories was necessary to avoid having another typical "Holocaust" film, but if Mayance carried the film herself from 1942 onwards, it would have been fine with me. I liked how the film portrayed a France that we do not get to see often--their experiences during the Holocaust, Vichy, etc. Yes, there are clichés, but sometimes they cannot be avoided. Hey, it's film-making after all! Overall, I give high praise for this film. It's unfortunate that Thomas and Mayance did not receive Oscar nominations for these role (but is anyone really surprised?!) but they will go far and continue to impress us

Taken as a whole, this film has to be considered a misfire. Though the story of a little Jewish girl named Sarah locking her little brother in a closet to hide him from police during WWII is interesting, the rest of the film about a journalist attempting to track her down is not. In spite of a good performance by Kristin Scott Thomas, her side of this drama lacks intensity, authenticity, and even narrative purpose. Is it only out of a sense of guilt that she wishes to track Sarah down? Simply because her French husband's family moved into the apartment with the little boy still locked inside the closet? Is this entire movie an indictment of the French in general for officially collaborating with the Nazis during the war? Is the reporter's husband's reluctance at being a father so late in life a byproduct of his country's selfish culture? I'm not sure, and personally have no ax to grind against the French, but this movie seems to have such an agenda.Sarah's key has some intense moments, but overall comes off as a Lifetime Network version of Schindler's list. Sarah is the story here. From the moment she discovers the fate of her brother we learn very little about her. She turned out to be a very attractive woman, so that was a plus. It is even hinted that she developed a taste for some of the wilder things in life, but exactly what those things were, this PG-13 rated film dares not tell us. Once we learn Sarah's eventual fate, we aren't that surprised, as guilt can be impossible to shake. But why couldn't we see more of her life after the war? Why do we need to learn about it in little nuggets from a reporter we really don't care about? Anyone else stunned she named her baby Sarah??? Never saw that coming. 6 of 10 stars.The Hound.

We'd heard good things about the book, and KST can do no wrong (impressive that she knows how to say things like "load-bearing wall" in French, no?), but the film itself was a disappointment. Mélusine Mayence gives a strong performance as the young Sarah and the main strand of the plot, set in 1942, is certainly engaging, but the secondary plot featuring KST as an investigative reporter seems contrived and condescending—as if we needed a framing tale about a contemporary woman and her contemporary problems to get us involved in a film about the Holocaust. My wife thought that the storyline with Sarah's brother, the cupboard and the key was a bit grotesque as well, like one of those Grimms' fairy tales they never let you read when you're a kid. A few scenes seem designed to help French audiences feel better about the role their grandparents might have played in these events: Apparently there were lots of Jewish kids who were sheltered by farm families, as shown in the film, but the scenes with the kindly guard at the transit camp didn't seem very plausible. All in all, I felt that "Sarah's Key'' was constantly plucking at our sleeves and reminding us that we were watching a high-minded, sensitive work of historical fiction; it's interesting that viewers who were previously unaware of the role played by the Vichy regime in the Holocaust seem to have been more impressed by this film than those who already had some background in the subject, which of course is still being debated. By contrast, Claude Miller's "A Secret" (2007), also currently available on streaming Netflix, tells a similar story— how a desperate, impulsive act at a life-or-death moment can change the history of a family for generations—in a much subtler and more convincing way; it has a great cast (Julie Depardieu, Ludivine Sagnier, Mathieu Amalric…), and we strongly recommend it. The final scene is a real heartbreaker.