Category Archives: Books

The opening of Sarah’s Key, a French drama based off a best-selling book of the same name, is promising; our titular character hides her brother in a locked closet as French police take her and the rest of her Jewish family off to concentration camps. They become part of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup; a Nazi-ordered mass arrest in Paris by French Police that resulted in over thirteen thousand Jews being held at the nearby Velodrome d’Hiver. The Velodrome is a massive indoor racing track, and as the harassed shuffle in for days of sweltering conditions without bathrooms or water (where many obviously died), the viewer braces themselves for another dark but at least new story of The Holocaust.

Five minutes later this part of the story ends and we follow Sarah who hopelessly races back to Paris to rescue her little brother still locked in a secret closet. The main arc isn’t anything new, but it’s rather understood that we as good progressive people will watch any well-shot Holocaust movie as our little penance to the horrible atrocity that happened. Since we didn’t step in sooner, we will watch a hundred movies of starving people shuffled into barns in the wilderness.

Here’s the curveball Sarah’s Key throws you, viewers: the majority of the movie jumps away from little Sarah and focuses on modern-day Julia; a journalist researching the event and tracking down what happened to our little survivor-to-be. Most of this time is spent as Julia dreads an oncoming pregnancy and moving. Let me restate this: we spend most of the movie with a rich woman worrying about her apartment and her baby. Read the rest of this entry →