This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 28, 2011 - In July 1942, thousands of French police, acting on the orders of the country's Nazi occupiers, arrested 13,000 French Jews and locked them up in a bicycle-racing arena a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower. The windows of the Velodrome d'Hiver were sealed, there were no working toilets, food and water were scarce and the mid-summer sun blazed through the roof of translucent glass, creating an immense, hellish greenhouse.
Some Jews died or killed themselves in the velodrome. The rest, after eight days, were transported to a French concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz. Only about 400 of the Jews taken into custody in what became known, infamously, as the "Vel d'Hiv Roundup," survived the war.
"Sarah's Key," based on the international bestseller of the same name by Tatiana de Rosnay, is the compelling story of one of the Jews imprisoned in the Vel d'Hiv, a 10-year-old girl named Sarah. The film also follows the parallel story of a 21st-century American-born journalist who tries to discover what happened to Sarah. In doing so, Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) also finds out a great deal about herself, and about her French husband and his family, who are connected to Sarah in mysterious ways.
Julia's quest to unravel that mystery is the engine that keeps the plot moving past the occasional false step - like some of the hard-to-believe details surrounding the fate of Sarah's brother.
The almost incomprehensibly cruel series of events known collectively as the Holocaust have inspired hundreds of feature films and documentaries, and some of the tragedy's stark images are indelible in our memories. "Sarah's Key" adds one that I'll not forget for a while, although on paper it sounds mild compared to some of the visions of mass death and torture the Nazis left us.
Young Sarah, dazed and shaken after being dragged into the arena by her countrymen, asks if she can go to the bathroom. A guard tells her the toilets are "blocked," and points at a wall prisoners are using as a latrine. The camera takes us there. The vision of public humiliation, with people forced to stand in human waste to meet a human need, is brief but horrific, a harbinger of much more horrible things to come as the prisoners are stripped of all vestiges of civilized society.
"Sarah's Key," directed by French filmmaker Gilles Paquet-Brenner, is a little too pat in some of its connections and coincidences, and a bit too prone to moments of sentimentality. But the film tells a story worth telling, and tells it generally well. The two lead actresses - Kristin Scott Thomas, fluent in both French and American English, as the journalist, and 10-year-old Melusine Mayance as Sarah - are superb, and lend the film considerable weight and credence.
Mr. Nice'
The Brit who used the alias "Mr. Nice" (Rhys Ifans) may actually be nice. He might be an amiable pot head who, as he says, became a big-time dope dealer because he had access to more cannabis than he ever could smoke. Or he may be one of the most dastardly, conniving, prevaricating villains ever to cross the English channel with a carload of Afghan hashish. That's the problem with "Mr. Nice," the movie. You spend two hours and one minute with its subject - real name Howard Marks - and you don't know any more about him when you finished than you did at the beginning.
Oh, you learn his basic resume, since the movie is based on his autobiography. According to Marks, after growing up slackerly in Wales, he drifted into Oxford University - it was the '70s, but still, does anybody just drift into Oxford?
He started smoking dope with his housemates, hooked up with his future wife, a beautiful libertine (Chloe Sevigny), drifted into the dope business, made a lot of money importing hashish from Pakistan, drifted into friendship with an insane Irish gunrunner (David Thewlis, in rabid badger mode), was recruited by the British Secret Service to keep an eye on the very criminals he was in business with, had a kid, got busted, was miraculously acquitted, had another kid, became a wine importer, made a lot of money, bought a luxurious villa in Italy, got bored with the sweet life, drifted back into the dope business, got busted, was sent to prison, eventually got out. And now, he is a standup monologist, apparently very well known in Europe. His autobiography was a bestseller.
Marks, as played by Ifans, is almost affectless, a lost soul adrift in an amniotic sea. Call me cynical, but I don't believe a goofy stoned dude with a Jeff Beck haircut and a "whatever, man" outlook on life - Zonker in "Doonesbury" comes to mind - just drifted into becoming one of the biggest dope dealers in the world and a bestselling author and monologist.
Director Bernard Rose ("Immortal Beloved") tells the story in a slow and highly disjointed way, which is probably a reflection of the nature of the autobiography. There are a few funny moments, and lots of stoned sex, but ultimately the movie seems like a intermittently interesting fairy tale invented by a man with a lot to hide - mainly himself.
Opens Friday July 29
Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon.