“Sarah’s Key” belongs to the Holocaust for Dummies section of Harvey Weinstein’s History for Dummies series of mer etricious glossy dramas that ransack global events and turn them into middlebrow women’s weepies to fill his trophy case. (See also: “The Reader,” last year’s “The Concert.”)
Kristin Scott Thomas plays Julia, an American woman living in Paris and married to a Frenchman who moves them into his grandparents’ apartment in the Marais, raising questions about its history. Cue flashback!
In 1942, the Jewish 10-year-old girl (Mélusine Mayance) of the title is rounded up with her mother and father for eventual extermination when she instantly seizes upon what is happening and decides she can save her little brother — by getting him to hide in a secret closet. He waits for her return while the family is shipped off, first to a Paris arena and then a concentration camp in the country.
Why would a girl who knows she’s about to be taken away lock the door on her brother? No reason, except writers love to create a talismanic symbol invested with emotional freight. Sarah spends much of the movie clutching, staring at, losing and recovering the key, as if the fate of the key is going to matter much if she doesn’t get back within a day or two.
Clunky, improbable plot developments (the girl easily escapes from the camp simply by asking a cop for help) match equally inept dialogue. Julia has lived in Paris for years, plus she’s a journalist with a special interest in history — so why is she asking a generic expert whether there were Jews in the Marais? Answer: because the writer couldn’t think of any more agile way to get in the fact everyone in Paris already knows — that the Marais was once a Jewish quarter.
Julia’s investigations into Sarah’s story — and her own drama about an unexpected late-life pregnancy after years of tragic attempts to get pregnant — are in the movie strictly to suck up to the audience, roughly 82.4 percent of which consists of upper-middle-class educated women with their IVF labs on speed dial.
“Sarah’s Key” is in no way a serious exploration of French complicity in the Holocaust (the details are kept well to the background so as not to be too much of a bummer). It simply leverages history’s greatest outrage to turn it into a little detective/sob story through which Thomas drifts.
She wallows in all the things the audience loves: secret antique letters and journals tied up just so, heartfelt discussions in sleek magazine offices and posh restaurants, effortless zooming from one to another of the kinds of cities beloved by art history majors (Paris, New York, Florence).
In the end, as the story trickles off into nothingness, the Holocaust is diminished to about the heft of “The Notebook.”